Trick if you are using IDA in a virtual machine

IDA General Use cases and examples
1

I use IDA Pro in a virtual machine and I use a little trick to update plugins without messing with the guest machine:

  1. I mount a directory inside the virtual machine as read-only from the host. I call this
    Z:\readonly
  2. In the guest, I set the environment variable %PYTHONPATH% to include his Z:\readonly directory.
  3. In the plugin directory (found by ida_diskio.get_ida_subdirs("plugins")[0]) I put a placeholder file that has the following content:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

''' Put this file in the IDA/plugins folder and the plugin file somewhere that IDA can reach it. '''

import os
exec(f"from {os.path.basename(__file__).replace('_ida.py','')} import *")
  1. From the host, I place the real file in the readonly directory with the same name except I removed the “_ida” part
  2. This way, I can update the files that are in the readonly directory from the host machine and still revert the guest machine.

Hope this trick helps someone else! Happy reversing!

2

Thanks for sharing the setup @Harding :clap:
I bet others find it useful!