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
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 3.10 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 uv. to keep you python packages separated in different environments. First install uv via pip
python3 -m pip install --user uv
The python-gvm repository uses autohooks to apply linting and auto formatting via git hooks. Please ensure the git hooks are active.
uv run autohooks activate --force
License
Copyright (C) 2017-2026 Greenbone AG
Licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later.