Greenbone Vulnerability Management Python Library

The Greenbone Vulnerability Management Python API library (python-gvm) is a collection of APIs that help with remote controlling Greenbone Community Edition installations and Greenbone Enterprise Appliances. The library essentially abstracts accessing the communication protocols Greenbone Management Protocol (GMP) and Open Scanner Protocol (OSP).

Table of Contents

• Documentation
• Installation
  • Version
  • Requirements
  • Install using pip
• Example
• Support
• Maintainer
• Contributing
• License

Documentation

The documentation for python-gvm can be found at https://greenbone.github.io/python-gvm/. Please always take a look at the documentation for further details. This README just gives you a short overview.

Installation

Version

python-gvm uses semantic versioning.

Versions prior to 26.0.0 used calendar versioning.

Please consider to always use the newest releases of gvm-tools and python-gvm. We frequently update these projects to add features and keep them free from bugs.

Important

To use python-gvm with GMP version of 7, 8 or 9 you must use a release version that is <21.5. In the 21.5 release the support of these versions has been dropped.

Important

To use python-gvm with GMP version 20.8 or 21.4 you must use a release version that is <24.6. In the 24.6 release the support of these versions has been dropped.

Requirements

Python 3.9 and later is supported.

Install using pip

You can install the latest stable release of python-gvm from the Python Package Index using pip:

python3 -m pip install --user python-gvm

Example

from gvm.connections import UnixSocketConnection
from gvm.protocols.gmp import GMP
from gvm.transforms import EtreeTransform
from gvm.xml import pretty_print

connection = UnixSocketConnection()
transform = EtreeTransform()

with GMP(connection, transform=transform) as gmp:
    # Retrieve GMP version supported by the remote daemon
    version = gmp.get_version()

    # Prints the XML in beautiful form
    pretty_print(version)

    # Login
    gmp.authenticate('foo', 'bar')

    # Retrieve all tasks
    tasks = gmp.get_tasks()

    # Get names of tasks
    task_names = tasks.xpath('task/name/text()')
    pretty_print(task_names)

Support

For any question on the usage of python-gvm please use the Greenbone Community Forum. If you found a problem with the software, please create an issue on GitHub.

Maintainer

This project is maintained by Greenbone AG.

Contributing

Your contributions are highly appreciated. Please create a pull request on GitHub. For bigger changes, please discuss it first in the issues.

For development you should use poetry to keep you python packages separated in different environments. First install poetry via pip

python3 -m pip install --user poetry

Afterwards run

poetry install

in the checkout directory of python-gvm (the directory containing the pyproject.toml file) to install all dependencies including the packages only required for development.

The python-gvm repository uses autohooks to apply linting and auto formatting via git hooks. Please ensure the git hooks are active.

poetry install
poetry run autohooks activate --force

License

Copyright (C) 2017-2025 Greenbone AG

Licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later.