Tips & Tricks

The Vagrantfile is a very flexible configuration format. Since it is just Ruby, there is a lot you can do with it. However, in that same vein, since it is Ruby, there are a lot of ways you can shoot yourself in the foot. When using some of the tips and tricks on this page, please take care to use them correctly.

Loop Over VM Definitions

If you want to apply a slightly different configuration to many multi-machine machines, you can use a loop to do this. For example, if you wanted to create three machines:

(1..3).each do |i|
  config.vm.define "node-#{i}" do |node|
    node.vm.provision "shell",
      inline: "echo hello from node #{i}"
  end
end

(1..3).each do |i|
  config.vm.define "node-#{i}" do |node|
    node.vm.provision "shell",
      inline: "echo hello from node #{i}"
  end
end

# THIS DOES NOT WORK!
for i in 1..3 do
  config.vm.define "node-#{i}" do |node|
    node.vm.provision "shell",
      inline: "echo hello from node #{i}"
  end
end

# THIS DOES NOT WORK!
for i in 1..3 do
  config.vm.define "node-#{i}" do |node|
    node.vm.provision "shell",
      inline: "echo hello from node #{i}"
  end
end

The for i in ... construct in Ruby actually modifies the value of i for each iteration, rather than making a copy. Therefore, when you run this, every node will actually provision with the same text.

This is an easy mistake to make, and Vagrant cannot really protect against it, so the best we can do is mention it here.

Overwrite host locale in SSH session

Usually, host locale environment variables are passed to guest. It may cause failures if the guest software do not support host locale. One possible solution is override locale in the Vagrantfile:

ENV["LC_ALL"] = "en_US.UTF-8"

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  # ...
end

ENV["LC_ALL"] = "en_US.UTF-8"
 
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  # ...
end

The change is only visible within the Vagrantfile.