# libvirt/libvirt

Read-only mirror. Please submit merge requests / issues to https://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt

Repository: https://github.com/libvirt/libvirt
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/libvirt
Language: C
License: LGPL-2.1
License Family: copyleft
Last push: 2026-08-25T17:49:48+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 77/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4121, "days_push": 8, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1719, forks 746 (observed 2026-08-28T04:05:26.652735+00:00)

## What it is
Libvirt is a portable, long-term stable C API and toolkit for managing virtualization technologies across many operating systems and hypervisors, including QEMU/KVM, Xen, LXC, bhyve, VMware, Hyper-V, and VirtualBox. It includes a stateful management daemon for hypervisor hosts and language bindings for Python, Go, Java, and others.

## Use cases
- manage KVM/QEMU virtual machines programmatically
- create and control VMs from a script or application
- manage LXC containers on a Linux host
- interface with VMware vCenter or ESX from code
- build a cloud management platform on top of hypervisors
- remotely administer virtualization hosts via a stable API
- monitor and control VM lifecycle (start, stop, snapshot, migrate)

## When to choose
- you need a stable, portable API to manage VMs across multiple hypervisors
- you are building infrastructure or cloud tooling that must support many virtualization backends
- you want mature, well-supported virtualization management with long-term API stability
- you need remote, privileged or unprivileged access to hypervisor hosts via a daemon

## When to avoid
- you only need to run a single VM interactively on your desktop (a GUI like virt-manager or VirtualBox is simpler)
- you are working with container orchestration rather than full virtualization (Kubernetes is a better fit)
- you need a high-level cloud orchestration layer rather than a low-level hypervisor API

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: stable
- function: sdk, developer-tools, configuration-management, deployment
- domain: infrastructure-as-code, cloud-computing, developer-tools, operating-systems
- platform: cross-platform, c, python, go, jvm, php, ruby
- tags: virtualization, hypervisor-management, kvm, qemu, xen, lxc, vmware, hyper-v, c-api, libvirt, linux

## Member repositories
- libvirt/libvirt (main) score 77

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:26.652735+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T03:34:07.747589+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/libvirt/libvirt (fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:26.652735+00:00, sha ce0930f477db)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.