62

Is there such a thing as list of available DBus services?
I've stumbled upon a few (like those provided by NetworkManager, Rhythmbox, Skype, HAL).
I wonder if I can find a rather complete list of provided services/interfaces.

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83

Session:

dbus-send --session           \
  --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus \
  --type=method_call          \
  --print-reply               \
  /org/freedesktop/DBus       \
  org.freedesktop.DBus.ListNames

System:

dbus-send --system            \
  --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus \
  --type=method_call          \
  --print-reply               \
  /org/freedesktop/DBus       \
  org.freedesktop.DBus.ListNames

You can also use DFeet if you prefer a GUI tool.

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  • 1
    @don-crissti how to the to list all object-paths under a service with dbus-send or gdbus? – Khurshid Alam Jan 8 '15 at 9:06
  • 1
    @KhurshidAlam - I have added an answer here. – don_crissti May 15 '15 at 23:06
30

qdbusviewer is your best friend; it allows you to send D-bus messages as well:

qdbusviewer showing the Session Bus tab with three subpanels

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  • Seems broken as of 2014. It lists the services but can't send messages.. – Pithikos Nov 6 '14 at 15:49
  • 4
    I can't even start it on Ubuntu 14.04. It fails with: qdbusviewer: could not exec '/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/qt4/bin/qdbusviewer': No such file or directory – kasperd Dec 28 '14 at 23:54
  • 3
    @Pithikos d-feet works as of today. – sherrellbc Oct 24 '16 at 7:37
  • @sherrellbc Please consider adding d-feet as an answer to make it more visible – mivk Feb 12 '17 at 14:18
26

The python way is the beautiful way.

System services:

import dbus
for service in dbus.SystemBus().list_names():
    print(service)

Session services:

import dbus
for service in dbus.SessionBus().list_names():
    print(service)
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  • Upvoted. I asked a follow-up question to your answer. unix.stackexchange.com/questions/203410/… – user768421 May 15 '15 at 1:58
  • I have a question, in a Plasma 5 desktop environment, the service org.kde.Spectacle is used for taking screenshot (and it's working), but it is neither listed in system bus nor session bus, why is that? – Meow Nov 1 '16 at 12:20
  • To help those who may be looking: for at least python 2.7.13 and 3.6, the package needed for this is dbus-python, installable with pip install dbus-python. The python-dbus package is also available (I was unable to get in working in the 2 minutes I tried). – bschlueter Aug 30 '17 at 5:09
4

gdbus is part of glib2 and supports Bash completions. Here is how to use it (on Fedora):

bash-4.4$ source /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/gdbus
bash-4.4$ gdbus call --system --dest <TAB><TAB>

This will show all possible destinations. To get a list of the available interfaces DBus exports the org.freedesktop.DBus.ListNames method. You can call it by running:

gdbus call --system --dest org.freedesktop.DBus \
           --object-path /org/freedesktop/DBus  \
           --method org.freedesktop.DBus.ListNames

Unfortunately this leads to unreadable output. Fortunately the output is valid python, so this is possible:

gdbus call --system --dest org.freedesktop.DBus      \
           --object-path /org/freedesktop/DBus       \
           --method org.freedesktop.DBus.ListNames | \
    python -c 'import sys, pprint; pprint.pprint(eval(sys.stdin.read()))'

I don't usually do this, but is a nice trick to keep on sleeve. I use gdbus for introspecting and proving concepts before moving to code. The bash completion saves a lot of typing and avoid typos. Would be nice to have gdbus displaying a nicer output.

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