How can I programatically determine if a Colima VM is running?

[chrislalos]

On OSX I have noticed there is an ssh.sock Unix socket, in my $HOME/.colima/_lima/colima folder. This socket seems to exist if and only if a colima VM is running. However, I haven't found any documentation for ssh.sock so I don't know if checking for ssh.sock is reliable. Of course there's always some sort of os.exec() of colima status but that doesn't feel ideal. Thanks!

[abiosoft]

You can inspect the status field of the json output after running colima list --json, and see if at least one of them has a Running status.

[chrislalos]

Thank you for the quick response!

I'm curious - what makes programatically invoking the colima CLI more reliable than checking for the existence of an ssh.sock Unix socket? I suppose I'm curious for any details re ssh.sock.

[abiosoft]

It is possible for the ssh.sock to exist without a Colima VM running in the rare case that the VM process quits abruptly.

[chrislalos]

Thank you again, and that makes perfect sense. I noted that to Colima's credit, Colima is well-behaved and cleans up the ssh.sock when the VM is stopped, but I can see where that cleanup might not happen in unforeseen circumstances.

I'm unaccustomed to checking if an app is running by executing a command line operation, though I'm not sure what I'm worried about. A user renaming the executable? Maybe it's ok, and if that's what you recommend I'll go with that.

Thank you for Colima!