Why?

This can be useful if you need solid remote access to a virtual machine using SPICE/QXL but don’t have access to the spice-gtk client for some reason.

Preparation

QEMU

If you are using QEMU without a GUI, you simply need to modify the SPICE parameter:

 -spice port=5900,disable-ticketing

This applies if you want to use port 5900 (this can be changed). For example, in a full command:

qemu-system-x86_64 \
  -m 1024 \
  -cdrom TinyCore-current.iso \
  -boot d \
  -vga qxl \
  -spice port=5900,disable-ticketing=on \
  -device virtio-serial \
  -chardev spicevmc,id=vdagent,debug=0,name=vdagent \
  -device virtserialport,chardev=vdagent,name=com.redhat.spice.0

virt-manager

In virt-manager, you just need to ensure:

• Spice Display -> Listen type is set to Address
• Spice Display -> Address is set to Localhost or All interfaces

depending on your needs. Also, define a port if necessary (if set to Auto, it will default to 5900).

Starting spice-html5

To start spice-html5, you need to have websockify and, of course, spice-html5 installed.

Once you have both installed and your virtual machine is running, simply execute the following command:

websockify --web=/usr/share/spice-html5/ 5959 localhost:5900

5959 is the target port, while localhost:5900 is the input address.

With this, if you open http://localhost:5959/spice.html in your browser (or replace localhost with your device’s IP), you will see the interface load and you’ll be able to control the virtual machine.

Video example (Youtube)