How To Setup An Headless Ubuntu 12.04 VirtualBox Host With PHPvirtualbox

I’m going to setup the headless VirtualBox server and Virtual Machine management console using phpvirtualbox which is a web-based frontend written in PHP.

This is a very basic Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server with only OpenSSH services installed so I’m going to need to add a few packages.

Let’s get started…

I’ll need to install an editor:

sudo apt-get install nano

And something to extract zip files:

sudo apt-get install unzip

Add the virtualbox repository to aptitude by editing the sources.list file:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

At the bottom of the file paste this line:

deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian precise contrib

Download and install the VirtualBox public key:

wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add –

Update aptitude:

sudo apt-get update

I’m going to need to install some web-services to support the phpvirtualbox management software. I’ll be using Apache2 for this:

sudo apt-get install apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils apache2.2-bin apache2.2-common apache2 apache2-doc apache2-suexec libapache2-mod-php5 libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap libapr1 php5-common php5-mysql php5-suhosin php-pear

Restart the Apache Web Server:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

I’ll need the wget package to download the phpvirtualbox management console and virtualbox extensions from the web:

sudo apt-get install wget

Install virtualbox 4.2.10:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-4.2 4.2.10

Download the extension pack:

wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.2.10/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.2.10-84104.vbox-extpack

Install the extension pack:

sudo VBoxManage extpack install Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.2.10-84104.vbox-extpack

Create a user for VirtualBox:

sudo adduser vboxadmin

Make this users primary group the vboxusers group:

sudo usermod -g vboxusers vboxadmin

Create the /etc/default/virtualbox file:

sudo nano /etc/default/virtualbox

And add this line:

VBOXWEB_USER=vboxadmin

Create the system links and start the virtualbox web service:

sudo update-rc.d vboxweb-service defaults
sudo /etc/init.d/vboxweb-service start

Now I’m going to go into the html root for the server:

cd /var/www

Download the phpvirtualbox zip package:

sudo wget https://phpvirtualbox.googlecode.com/files/phpvirtualbox-4.2-4.zip

Extract the software:

sudo unzip phpvirtualbox-4.2-4.zip

Rename the phpvirtualbox folder:

sudo mv phpvirtualbox-4.2-4 phpvirtualbox

Copy the example configuration file:

sudo cp config.php-example config.php

And edit that file:

sudo nano config.php

You’ll need to edit the lines for username and password:

/* Username / Password for system user that runs VirtualBox */
var $username = ‘vboxadmin‘;
var $password = ‘vboxadminspassword‘;

Our installation is now complete and you can login to the phpvirtualbox front-end by browsing to:

http://yourserver/phpvirtualbox

The default username and password are both admin

Welcome to the phpvirtualbox web-based management console for your headless Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Virtual Machine Host.