Vagrant ManagedServers Provider

This is a Vagrant 1.2+ plugin that adds a provider for "managed servers" to Vagrant, i.e. servers for which you have SSH access but no control over their lifecycle.

Since you don't control the lifecycle:

• up and destroy are re-interpreted as "linking" / "unlinking" vagrant with a managed server
• once "linked", the ssh and provision commands work as expected and status shows the managed server as either "running" or "not reachable"
• halt, reload and suspend and resume are no-ops in this provider

Credits: this provider was initially based on the vagrant-aws provider with the AWS-specific functionality stripped out.

NOTE: This plugin requires Vagrant 1.2+

Features

• SSH into managed servers.
• Provision managed servers with any built-in Vagrant provisioner.
• Minimal synced folder support via rsync.

Usage

Install using standard Vagrant 1.1+ plugin installation methods. After installing, vagrant up and specify the managed provider. An example is shown below.

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-managed-servers
...
$ vagrant up --provider=managed
$ vagrant provision
...

Of course prior to doing this, you'll need to obtain an managed server-compatible box file for Vagrant. Simply use the managed server dummy box for this purpose (see below).

Quick Start

After installing the plugin (instructions above), the quickest way to get started is to actually use a managed server dummy box and specify the IP address / hostname of the managed server within a config.vm.provider block. So first, add the dummy box using any name you want:

$ vagrant box add dummy https://github.com/tknerr/vagrant-managed-servers/raw/master/dummy.box --provider=managed
...

And then make a Vagrantfile that looks like the following, filling in your information where necessary.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "dummy"

  config.vm.provider :managed do |managed, override|
    managed.server = "ip-or-hostname"
    override.ssh.username = "ubuntu"
    override.ssh.private_key_path = "PATH TO YOUR PRIVATE KEY"
  end
end

Then run vagrant up --provider=managed to "link" vagrant with the managed server.

Once linked, you can run vagrant ssh to ssh into the managed server or vagrant provision to provision that server with any of the available vagrant provisioners.

If you are done, you can "unlink" vagrant from the managed server by running vagrant destroy.

If you try any of the other VM lifecycle commands like halt, resume, reload, etc... you will get a warning that these commands are not supported with the vagrant-managed-servers provider.

Box Format

Every provider in Vagrant must introduce a custom box format.

This provider introduces managed box which is really nothing more than the required metadata.json with the provider name set to "managed".

Typically you will not need to change this and can always use the dummy.box

Configuration

This provider currently exposes only a single provider-specific configuration option:

• server - The IP address or hostname of the existing managed server

It can be set like typical provider-specific configuration:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  # ... other stuff

  config.vm.provider :managed do |managed|
    managed.server = "some-server.org"
  end
end

Networks

Networking features in the form of config.vm.network are not supported with vagrant-managed-servers. If any of these are specified, Vagrant will emit a warning and just ignore it.

Synced Folders

There is minimal support for synced folders. Upon vagrant provision, the managed servers provider will use rsync (if available) to uni-directionally sync the folder to the remote machine over SSH.

This is good enough for all built-in Vagrant provisioners (shell, chef, and puppet) to work!

Development

To work on the vagrant-managed-servers plugin, clone this repository out, and use Bundler to get the dependencies:

$ bundle

Once you have the dependencies, verify the unit tests pass with rake:

$ bundle exec rake

If those pass, you're ready to start developing the plugin. You can test the plugin without installing it into your Vagrant environment by using the Vagrantfile in the top level of this directory and use bundler to execute Vagrant.

First, fake a managed server by bringing up the fake_managed_server vagrant VM with the default virtualbox provider:

$ bundle exec vagrant up fake_managed_server

Now you can use the managed provider (defined in a separate VM named my_server) to ssh into or provision the (fake) managed server:

$ # link vagrant with the server
$ bundle exec vagrant up my_server --provider=managed
$ # ssh / provision
$ bundle exec vagrant ssh my_server
$ bundle exec vagrant provision my_server
$ # unlink
$ bundle exec vagrant destroy my_server