DBus-Inspector is a development tool to show the contents of the DBus message bus. It uses the “Introspection” data provided by most applications.

The DBus is a new protocol for inter-process communication, mostly for desktop systems. It's being used by numerous GNOME and KDE-applications, and is developed by the Freedesktop.org-project. Typical use cases are reacting to hardware changes (e.g. a USB drive being connected) or to network connectivity changes (e.g. when a new WIFI network is detected).

It mostly shows methods (later versions will also allow you to trigger methods directly for testing purposes) and signals with their signature. For obvious reasons, these informations can only be displayed if correct information was provided by the application via the "Introspect" method; unfortunately not all DBus applications have correct information here.

Dbus-inspector is currently not under active development, due to lack of time. In GNOME SVN is the latest (unreleased) version.

D-Feet is a more advanced project with the same goals.

DBus-Inspector is written in Python and uses PyGTK and the Python DBus bindings. If these are isntalled, it should run directly without installation or compilation.

Download sourcecode (License: GPL)

The latest version can be found in GNOME SVN. This version also solves a problem where invalid XML data from DBus-Services would shut down dbus-inspector with an unhandled exception. But since this version also introduces new, not-yet-functional buttons, it wasn't released yet.