A list of available D-Bus services

Question

Is there such a thing as list of available D-Bus 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.

Similar question on ask Ubuntu site →appmenu - How do I get a list of all of the available dbus properties? - Ask Ubuntu — user202729, Oct 15 '22 at 16:28

don_crissti · Accepted Answer · 2023-11-11T14:41:48.533

130

On QT setups (short commands and clean, human readable output) you can run:

qdbus

will list list the services available on the session bus and

qdbus --system

will list list the services available on the system bus.

On any setup you can use dbus-send

dbus-send --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus  /org/freedesktop/DBus org.freedesktop.DBus.ListNames

Just like qdbus, if --session or no message bus is specified, dbus will send to the login session message bus. So the above will list the services available on the session bus.
Use --system if you want instead to use the system wide message bus:

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

edited Nov 11 '23 at 14:41

answered Aug 25 '12 at 14:13

don_crissti

82,805

1

@don-crissti how to the to list all object-paths under a service with dbus-send or gdbus? – Khurshid Alam Jan 08 '15 at 09:06
1

@KhurshidAlam - I have added an answer here. – don_crissti May 15 '15 at 23:06
DFeet has been discontinued but there's an alternative called D-Spy. – David Ferenczy Rogožan Nov 11 '23 at 03:52
@DavidFerenczyRogožan - you should put that in an answer (with a couple of screenshots maybe...). I haven't been using gnome in years, I'll remove the D-Feet reference from my answer. – don_crissti Nov 11 '23 at 14:41
Note that you can also use qdbus to list possible paths, for example qdbus org.xfce.Thunar; and you can also list methods for given service and path, for example qdbus org.xfce.Thunar /org/xfce/FileManager. – Mikko Rantalainen Feb 20 '24 at 13:53
For modern systems using systemd you want to use busctl. – Mikko Rantalainen Feb 20 '24 at 13:59

Pithikos · Answer 2 · 2022-01-24T16:47:30.407

48

With Python it can be simpler.

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)

edited Jan 24 '22 at 16:47

answered Nov 06 '14 at 15:46

Pithikos

3,294

Upvoted. I asked a follow-up question to your answer. http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/203410/how-to-list-all-object-paths-under-a-dbus-service – user768421 May 15 '15 at 01:58
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 01 '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). – Schlueter Aug 30 '17 at 05:09
This solution was very helpful on an embedded system that didn't have qdbus installed. – ichabod Nov 02 '21 at 16:31

score 35 · Answer 3 · edited Jan 28 '18 at 18:33

35

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

qdbusviewer showing the Session Bus tab with three subpanels

edited Jan 28 '18 at 18:33

Jeff Schaller

67,283
35
116
255

answered Aug 25 '12 at 15:30

daisy

54,555

Seems broken as of 2014. It lists the services but can't send messages.. – Pithikos Nov 06 '14 at 15:49
6

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
7

@Pithikos d-feet works as of today. – sherrellbc Oct 24 '16 at 07:37
3

@sherrellbc Please consider adding d-feet as an answer to make it more visible – mivk Feb 12 '17 at 14:18
As of Ubuntu 20.04, runs but doesn't list all services – usretc Jan 03 '21 at 11:04
I wonder what are these :1.1* services... – x-yuri Dec 23 '21 at 07:42
@kasperd I need to install qttools5-dev-tools to avoid that error on Debian 11. – Scorpion Sep 05 '22 at 11:30
Seems broken with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. All I get is qdbusviewer: could not find a Qt installation of '' – Mikko Rantalainen Feb 20 '24 at 13:55

score 21 · Answer 4 · edited Mar 15 '18 at 03:57

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.

Neat tool recommendation; thanks! As of F31 at least note that Bash completions are loaded by default, no need to source them manually. — tne, Apr 19 '20 at 08:08

score 15 · Answer 5 · edited Nov 30 '22 at 20:57

I prefer busctl.
Note that unlike other tools like qdbus and dbus-send this one defaults to the --system bus so to communicate with the session manager you have to explicitly use the --user switch. Also, the list command is the default operation if no command is specified so

busctl

is the same as

busctl list --system

or

# busctl list
NAME                                             PID PROCESS         USER             CONNECTION    UNIT                                                               SESSION DESCRIPTION
:1.0                                             162 systemd-timesyn systemd-timesync :1.0          systemd-timesyncd.service                                          -       -          
:1.1                                             157 systemd-network systemd-network  :1.1          systemd-networkd.service                                           -       -          
:1.10                                            199 phosphor-dump-m root             :1.10         obmc-dump-monitor.service                                          -       -          
:1.11                                            216 fru-device      root             :1.11         xyz.openbmc_project.FruDevice.service         
...

and after you can see the tree for each one

# busctl tree :1.0
`-/org
  `-/org/freedesktop
    |-/org/freedesktop/LogControl1
    `-/org/freedesktop/timesync1

busctl is definitely the way to go for all distros that default to systemd. — Mikko Rantalainen, Feb 20 '24 at 13:58

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Apr 25 '22 at 07:50

I would recommend also dasbus

from dasbus.connection import SystemMessageBus
bus = SystemMessageBus()
busproxy = bus.proxy
for i in sorted(busproxy.ListNames()):
    print(i)

(Substitute SessionMessageBus for the session bus.)

From the shell, on systemd systems there is busctl

busctl list

A list of available D-Bus services

6 Answers6

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