A tool to get the usb.autoConnectstring to connect a iOS/tvOS devices to VMWare Fusion
When using VMWare Fusion to test iOS/tvOS devices you usually need to assign one or more devices to specific VMs. If you are trying to script this you need to edit the .vmx file inside the bundle that is the VMWare document (those are typically in ~/Documents/Virtual Machines), specifically adding one or more lines like this:
usb.autoConnect.device0 = "vid:05ac pid:12a0 path:0/0/2"
The vid and pid are product and vendor (Apple) id's respectively, and path describes on what port the USB device is connected in the USB tree. If you only have a single device then you might be able to get away with only providing the vid and pid, but if you have multiple devices, especially ones that are close enough to share the same pid then you need to specify the path to get the right one.
This tool finds all of the iPhones/iPads/AppleTVs connected to the computer and gives you back the string to put into the above line in your .vmx file. If you call it with a serial number then it will print only that information in the format that VMWare Fusion likes.
There are two modes to this tool:
- Called with no arguments it lists all of the devices it finds.
- With one argument it looks for a device with that serial number and prints the information for the
autoConnectline or fails (exit(1)), suitable for use in automation.
The only dependencies this tool have are on ioreg (part of MacOS X) and Python (included in MacOS X), so it should be readily usable in automation on MacOS.
I should mention here that VMWare Fusion's path is a little odd. Specifically it is the same path as is returned by the Location ID entry in SystemProfiler.app, but with the first two digits reversed. I have tested this conclusion on a number of different USB configurations and am pretty confident in this, but would be happy to help troubleshoot anyone who finds a case where this is wrong.