[pve-devel] Interest in a file manager interface within pve-manager?

["Blythe, Nathan F. - US via pve-devel" <pve-devel@lists.proxmox.com>]

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From: "Blythe, Nathan F. - US" <nathaniel.blythe@caci.com>
To: "pve-devel@lists.proxmox.com" <pve-devel@lists.proxmox.com>
Subject: Interest in a file manager interface within pve-manager?
Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2024 22:27:32 +0000
Message-ID: <SN5P110MB08631CBC92535BADBE9076B8E1A5A@SN5P110MB0863.NAMP110.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM>

Hello,

We have a need for a non-network based (i.e. hypercall / out-of-band) file browser for containers and VMs within the pve-manager web UI. I'd like to be able to select a VM or container, click "More", and choose "File manager" and then browse the VM or container's file systems and upload or download files from my local system, through the web-browser.

For VMs (qemu), the qemu-guest-agent provides the ability to read/write guest files, and the pve API exposes it (with strict file size limits) as nodes->{node}->qemu->{vmid}->agent->file-*. Presumably, a web UI file manager would use that API endpoint, plus maybe an enhancement for directory listing and chunked upload/download (to support arbitrary size files).

For containers (LXC), the pct application can read/write files by (I think) mounting the container root file system on the host and touching it directly. But there's no corresponding API endpoint. If there were, it could be used by a future web UI file manager.

So to implement this feature, I think there are 5 steps:

  1.  Enhance the qemu-guest-agent and qm to support reading directory structure and creating directories.
  2.  Enhance the pve API to expose these new features like file-read and file-write.
  3.  Enhance the pve API to support chunked file read and write, for large files. Maybe also requiring an enhancement to the qemu-guest-agent?
  4.  Enhance the pve API to support chunked file read/write, whole file read/write, and directory structure/creating directories (through direct filesystem interaction on the host).
  5.  Write a JS front-end file manager, invokable from the Other menu, which uses these new/enhanced API endpoints to implement a general purpose out-of-band file manager.

Is there interest from the proxmox developers for something like this? If we started working on some of these items, would there be interest in accepting patches? Does my general approach look sound?

(We also investigated using SPICE's folder-sharing capabilities and the spice-proxy provided by the host, but that doesn't work with the Windows virt-viewer client, only the Linux client. It looks like there was some interest in the past in enhancing xterm.js to support xmodem file transfer, but it didn't go far.)

Regards,
Nathan Blythe
CACI

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