vboxautostart Setup on Ubuntu 18.04

Posted on Mar 8, 2019 | 107 words | ~1 min

In this article I show how to setup VirtualBox to start a virtual machine on boot of an Ubuntu 18.04 system.

Setup vboxautostart

sudo mkdir /etc/vobx
# set environment variables
sudo tee -a /etc/default/virtualbox <<'EOF'
VBOXAUTOSTART_DB=/etc/vbox
VBOXAUTOSTART_CONFIG=/etc/vbox/vboxauto.conf
EOF

# set vboxautostart policy
sudo tee -a /etc/vbox/vboxauto.conf << "EOF"
default_policy = deny
$USER = {
    allow = true
}
EOF

sudo chgrp vboxusers /etc/vbox
sudo chmod 1775 /etc/vbox
sudo usermod -aG vboxusers $USER
VBoxManage setproperty autostartdbpath /etc/vbox

sudo service vboxautostart-service restart
sudo reboot

Enable autostart for Your VM

VBoxManage -nologo list vms
VM="Name_Of_Your_VM"
VBoxManage modifyvm "${VM}" --autostart-enabled on --autostop-type acpishutdown
sudo systemctl stop vboxautostart-service
sudo systemctl start vboxautostart-service