Too tired to type environment variables everytime I need to start a session, too often I forgot to login before firing up some commands, too paranoid to store my secret inside clear text file, I wrote this small abusive script to help me with govc.

Now whenever I call it unauthenticated, a humble interactive prompt will greet me to enter my credentials, with invisible password typing, before evaluating my command inside a new shell.

Just exit from the shell, and all those credentials in my environment are gone.

This is tricky. A fake govc executable and a bashrc snippet are the playmakers.

Before logged-in, they will masquerade the real govc from the path, and supply the fake one. And after logged-in, they hide the fake one, and will reveal the real govc to the path.

This masquerading and revealing mechanism is abusing shell executable path priority.

But I desperately need shell completion, even before logged-in. And this is the trickiest part. So I shamelessly modified the govc_bash_completion from vmware/govmomi.

• The fake govc needs the real one: govc.

• For the govc-vmid and govc-vmrc: jq.

• For the govc-vmrc tool: vmrc.

The real govc does not need to be accessible from the path. But both jq and vmrc should be.

1. Fill in the govc-autologin.conf with your default govc environment.

   The real govc does not need to be accessible from the path beforehand. But then you must supply the real govc full path, and cannot simply use GOVC_REAL_BIN="$(which govc)".

2. Source the govc-autologin.bash from your bashrc, e.g.

   . ${HOME}/bin/govc-autologin/govc-autologin.bash
   

3. Open a new shell, and all is set.

   Run govc ls / to test.

4. Run which govc and note the result.

5. Fire up exit, and run which govc again.

   Note the difference with previous result.

Assuming each VM has a unique name accross vSphere datacenters, you can get any VM ID or open its console only by its name.

For example:

• govc-vmid salt to get the ID of salt VM.

• govc-vmrc ns1 to open ns1 VM console.

  Or better, simply call vmrc ns1. Since the real vmrc is overridden by govc-vmrc using alias,

While this script and tools still work as expected, sometimes I get both govc-autologin and govc-autologin/tools paths added twice. Not sure for now, but I guess it's Konsole and yakuake messing up my environment variables.