box

This post is about a fully documented but easy to miss feature of vagrant, which is the evaluation of the Vagrantfiles when a vagrant ‘box’ is started. As you can see, I wrote ‘Vagrantfiles’, which is plural. I (very naively) thought that the Vagrantfile in the directory where you want to start the ‘box’ determines the specifics of the vagrant ‘box’.

This begins with me trying to create a vagrant virtualbox VM using packer, where I specify a Vagrantfile during the packer build. I normally don’t spend a lot of thought on that, and just put in a very simple Vagrantfile, essentially just defining the box and setting memory and cpu amounts.

In this case, I decided to put in the Vagrantfile that I wanted to use for this special purpose ‘box’ as the Vagrantfile for the packer build, which has some ruby in it which adds a disk: