Use Brrr and VirtualBuddy ... how to setup

[mcnahum]

I'm not sure If the help of @insidegui is needed here but I would love to integrate Brrr (https://github.com/simonbs/brrr-cli) with Virtualbuddy ... ideally it will send me a notification when my VM is setup ( failed or succeed).
As I'm stepping my VM on a separated Mac than my laptop that will help me to don't forget about it or at the reverse to spend my time to check if it is done...

[insidegui]

Having an "action when finished installing" feature is planned, and one of the actions could be "run a shell script" that then triggers whatever notification mechanism you want.

I'm not familiar with how Brrr works, but the only mechanism I can think of right now to observe the state of the VM setup externally would be to watch the .vbdata/Metadata.plist file inside the virtual machine bundle. VirtualBuddy sets the installFinished key to true in that property list when installation completes.

If you can somehow make a tool watch that file for changes and parse the installFinished property, you can then use that signal to trigger whatever notification mechanism you want. You can probably use help from a coding agent to get this done 😄

[mcnahum]

Very good idea, I did it and already have a working prototype ... is there a way to detect when the installation failed? ( a lot this days with the macOS27 /xcode27 issue...)

[insidegui]

That I don't think is doable just by reading the metadata. That's actually a good idea, the app should probably store error information with the VM for debugging 🤔

Hacky workaround suggestion: have something that takes a screenshot of the VM installation window then uses OCR to detect an error state 🥲