When you use a VM, it is often needed to transfer files from the host to the VM and vice-versa.

One of the usual options for that is a shared folder that needs previously to be configured.

Sometimes happens that you can have an issue with this configuration and it is not possible to do it as easy as it should be.

Here is when Magic Wormhole comes to the rescue.

According to its description:

…It is a tool which makes it possible to get arbitrary-sized files and directories (or short pieces of text) from one computer to another.

https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io

Installation and Usage (Debian/Ubuntu)

$ sudo apt install magic-wormhole

From the host:

$ wormhole send file.txt

Sending 9 Bytes file named 'file.txt'
Wormhole code is: 4-sandalwood-glucose
On the other computer, please run:

wormhole receive 4-sandalwood-glucose

Sending (<-192.168.253.128:60652)..
100%|█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 9.00/9.00 [00:00<00:00, 12.4kB/s]
File sent.. waiting for confirmation
Confirmation received. Transfer complete.

From the VM:

$ wormhole receive

Enter receive wormhole code: 4-sandalwood-glucose
 (note: you can use <Tab> to complete words)
Receiving file (9 Bytes) into: file.txt
ok? (Y/n): y
Receiving (->tcp:192.168.253.1:56622)..
100%|███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 9.00/9.00 [00:00<00:00, 38.4B/s]
Received file written to file.txt

It has many possible uses in many different situations.

The tool is an easy way to transfer files securely from 2 machines that can help you without any complex previous setup.

tools transfer files wormhole