Auto-starting VirtualBox VMs on MacOS High Sierra

macos-vbox.md

Auto-starting VirtualBox VMs on MacOS High Sierra

Updated May 21/2018

There are lots of different how-tos out there for automatically launching VMs using VirtualBox on MacOS. Most of them focus on older versions of VirtualBox or old versions of MacOS.

Tested using MacOS High Sierra 10.13.4 running VirtualBox 5.2.12. The guest OS is Fedora 28.

Following the instructions on the VirtualBox website (https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#autostart), copy the Virtualbox autostart plist template file to your system's LaunchDaemons folder.

david$ sudo cp \
    /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/org.virtualbox.vboxautostart.plist \
    /Library/LaunchDaemons

Backslashes for readability :-).

Edit /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.virtualbox.vboxautostart.plist and set Disabled to false.

Create the file /etc/vbox/autostart.cfg with the following content:

default_policy = deny
david = {
    allow = true
    startup_delay = 10
}

Change david to match your MacOS username ($ whoami).

Next, get a list of VMs on the system:

$ VBoxManage list vms
"Fedora Server" {GUID for server displayed here}

For each server that you want to automatically start, enable autostart, configure the autostop-type method, and enable headless mode.

VBoxManage modifyvm "Fedora Server" --autostart-enabled on
VBoxManage modifyvm "Fedora Server" --autostop-type acpishutdown
VBoxManage modifyvm "Fedora Server" --defaultfrontend headless

Finally, test the configuration by running:

sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.virtualbox.vboxautostart.plist

Thanks, this works very well for me. I wonder: on macOS should we touch /etc for these kind of non-Apple configuration files? Would it be more appropriate to use for example /Library/Application Support/VirtualBox as the location for autostart.cfg?

Thanks! Works on Mojave for me.

So this works great for automatically starting the VMs, but as far as I can tell it still won't do a graceful shutdown of the guest. The Mac reboots just fine, but it's just killing the guest and then restarting as opposed to a graceful shutdown. I've tried both acpishutdown and savestate and neither seems to work.

I should add that I can do a an acpishutdown just fine from the GUI and the guest will shutdown gracefully.

Any ideas? I'm running Mac OS Mojave.

I just made it work nice and easily with MacOS High Sierra 10.13.6 and VirtualBox 6.0.10
Thank you!

I get the following error: VBoxAutostart: error: User is not allowed to autostart VMs
Running on Sierra

Sounds like you may have forgot to change david = { } to your username first.

Worked for me on an older Mac Mini running MacOS Sierra

It doesn't seem to work on VBox v6.x. It doesn't see VMs from earlier versions so I can't autostart things it doesn't know about.

VBoxManage registervm FreeBSD10.vbox

VBoxManage: error: Runtime error opening '/var/root/Library/VirtualBox/FreeBSD10.vbox' for reading: -102 (File not found.).
VBoxManage: error: /Users/vbox/tinderbox/6.0-mac-rel/src/VBox/Main/src-server/MachineImpl.cpp[497] (nsresult Machine::initFromSettings(VirtualBox *, const com::Utf8Str &, const com::Guid *))
VBoxManage: error: Details: code NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005), component MachineWrap, interface IMachine, callee nsISupports
VBoxManage: error: Context: "OpenMachine(Bstr(a->argv[0]).raw(), machine.asOutParam())" at line 86 of file VBoxManageMisc.cpp

Looks to me like someone hardcoded a path. Even I know that's a Bad Idea. Should be able to pass a .vbox file as an argument and the binary work out the path or ask for it.