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.

Solution 1

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

---

You could also use DFeet if you prefer a graphical tool (see the other answers for more GUI options).

Solution 2

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)

Solution 3

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

Solution 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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Comments

[Pithikos]

Seems broken as of 2014. It lists the services but can't send messages..

[Rob C]

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

[user768421]

Upvoted. I asked a follow-up question to your answer. unix.stackexchange.com/questions/203410/…

[don_crissti]

@KhurshidAlam - I have added an answer here.

[Louis Kröger]

@Pithikos d-feet works as of today.

[Meow]

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?

[mivk]

@sherrellbc Please consider adding d-feet as an answer to make it more visible

[bschlueter]

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).

[tne]

Neat tool recommendation; thanks! As of F31 at least note that Bash completions are loaded by default, no need to source them manually.

[usretc]

As of Ubuntu 20.04, runs but doesn't list all services

[ichabod]

This solution was very helpful on an embedded system that didn't have qdbus installed.

[x-yuri]

I wonder what are these :1.1* services...