I only need my VM to be accessible 2 days a week so is there a simple way I could somehow trigger a power on of the VM?

 

I have nextcloud so I thought is there a way using a script that I could watch for the presence of a file or a change of a file to trigger?

Use this as a starting point

 

 

You'd of course have to modify the scripts with the appropriate commands to turn off the VM

In case anyone ever asks, I got this working quite simply by doing the following:

 

#!/bin/bash

f=/path/to/file/on/nextcloud/instance

inotifywait -m -e modify "$f" --format "%e" | while read -r event; do
    if [ "$event" == "MODIFY" ]; then

        cat $f
        contents=$( cat $f )
        if [ $contents == "on" ]; then

                echo "Starting VM"
                virsh start "VM NAMe"

        elif [ $contents == "off" ]; then

                echo "Stopping VM"
                virsh shutdown "VM NAMe"

        fi

    fi
done

 

So basically create a text file on your nextcloud instance and then find the path to it via the terminal. If you then edit the file via the nextcloud web interface or mobile app and set the contents to "on" or "off" it will power the VM on or off accordingly.

Edited January 23, 20233 yr by allanp81