A while back I published the first version of the Horizon Golden Image Deployment Tool (HGIDT), a small desktop app to push golden images to VMware Horizon instant-clone pools without having to click through the Horizon Admin console. Since then the tool has grown quite a bit, so it’s time for a proper write-up of everything that’s changed.
You can grab the latest release as a ready-to-run package from the Releases page on GitHub — no Python installation needed.
What the tool does
HGIDT is a desktop application that talks directly to the Horizon REST API. You point it at a Connection Server, give it credentials, and it lets you:
- Push a new base VM and snapshot to instant-clone VDI desktop pools and RDS farms
- Enable or disable provisioning per pool or farm
- Schedule a push for a specific date and time
- Resize the compute profile (CPU, cores per socket, RAM) as part of a push
- Manage the secondary image workflow — stage, promote, or cancel All of this from a single window, without touching the Horizon Admin console.
What’s new
- new gui
- filtering in golden images list
- improved performance
- improved golden image/snapshot selection from api
- added option to not pull golden images/ snapshots all the time
Platform support: Windows, macOS, and Linux
The tool originally only had a Windows build. This release adds native macOS and Linux builds.
macOS ships as a .dmg containing a .app bundle. Because the app isn’t signed with an Apple Developer certificate, macOS Gatekeeper will warn you on first launch — right-click the app, choose Open, and confirm the prompt.
Linux ships as a ZIP with a standalone folder. The only runtime requirement is a display server (X11 or Wayland) and the Qt XCB platform dependencies, which are typically already present on any desktop Linux system. Password saving requires a running keyring daemon (GNOME Keyring or KWallet); without one the app still works, you just re-enter your password each session.
Windows continues to ship as a ZIP with a standalone folder containing the .exe.
All three are available on the Releases page.
Requirements
- VMware Horizon 2312 or later
- The Horizon REST API must be reachable from the machine running the tool
- An account with sufficient Horizon admin privileges to update desktop pools and farms
Running from source
If you prefer to run from source rather than the pre-built binary:
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate # macOS / Linux
# .venv\Scripts\activate # Windows
pip install -r requirements.txt
python horizon_golden_image_deployment_tool.py
Feedback and pull requests welcome on GitHub.
