How do I associate a Vagrant project directory with an existing VirtualBox VM?

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Somehow my Vagrant project has disassociated itself from its VirtualBox VM, so that when I vagrant up Vagrant will import the base-box and create a new virtual machine.

Is there a way to re-associate the Vagrant project with the existing VM? How does Vagrant internally associate a Vagrantfile with a VirtualBox VM directory?

Grimonia answered 24/2, 2012 at 16:26 Comment(0)

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WARNING: The solution below works for Vagrant 1.0.x but not Vagrant 1.1+.

Vagrant uses the ".vagrant" file in the same directory as your "Vagrantfile" to track the UUID of your VM. This file will not exist if a VM does not exist. The format of the file is JSON. It looks like this if a single VM exists:

{
   "active":{
      "default":"02f8b71c-75c6-4f33-a161-0f46a0665ab6"
   }
}

default is the name of the default virtual machine (if you're not using multi-VM setups).

If your VM has somehow become disassociated, what you can do is do VBoxManage list vms which will list every VM that VirtualBox knows about by its name and UUID. Then manually create a .vagrant file in the same directory as your Vagrantfile and fill in the contents properly.

Run vagrant status to ensure that Vagrant picked up the proper changes.

Note: This is not officially supported by Vagrant and Vagrant may change the format of .vagrant at any time. But this is valid as of Vagrant 0.9.7 and will be valid for Vagrant 1.0.

Malfeasance answered 24/2, 2012 at 20:47 Comment(8)

Awesome! Thank you. I had a feeling something was missing. – Grimonia 24/2, 2012 at 20:55

Could be 'default' changes to custom name without using multi-VM config? – Dm 14/11, 2012 at 21:2

For Vagrant 1.1, the UUIDs are stored in a machine-specific file at .vagrant/machines/{name}/{provider}/id. In fact, the only thing that file contains is the UUID. – Archangel 10/5, 2013 at 16:56

I tried this trick but vagrant status simply reports the state as not created. Vagrant up then creates a new vm and works fine. If I change the id file it then reports as not created, even if I change it back to the uuid of the box it just created. – Joacimah 21/5, 2013 at 16:47

With Vagrant 1.1+, make sure you don't add a newline to the end of the id. See github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/1755 for details – Sluggish 23/5, 2013 at 9:13

+1 to @JustinY - the {provider} specific directory structure was the key for me – Reader 4/12, 2013 at 3:6

I was looking for .vagrant in my profile (Mac). Note that (at least for me) it was in the same folder as the cookbooks folder and VagrantFile. (Vagrant version 1.4.3) – Cystic 10/3, 2014 at 14:58

@Mitchell, there is a popular plugin for Vagrant github.com/tknerr/vagrant-managed-servers which allows you to use existing virtual machine from many projects. For example, I develop on Windows/OSX, have one vagrant docker-host machine, and all my other projects just mapp some folders to docker-host, and start containers there. Unfortunately this plugin has some issues, in particular rsync/rsync-auto do not work with it. Why not to make this possibility integral part of Vagrant, so we don't have to hack .vagrant folders ? – Liddle 3/9, 2015 at 13:48

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For Vagrant 1.6.3 do the following:

1) In the directory where your Vagrantfile is located, run the command

VBoxManage list vms

You will have something like this:

"virtualMachine" {xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}

2) Go to the following path:

cd .vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox

3) Create a file called id with the ID of your VM xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

4) Save the file and run vagrant up

Together answered 26/8, 2014 at 23:35 Comment(8)

A good way to create the id file without a newline is echo -n '<your id here>' > id . – Electrophysiology 12/8, 2015 at 19:31

Works great. But why does this happen? – Tolbooth 6/10, 2015 at 16:21

Worked for me with Vagrant 1.7.2. Thanks! – Gon 11/2, 2016 at 19:46

Worked perfectly. – Foliole 23/2, 2017 at 16:32

# test1 and test2 boxes...

for box in test1 test2; do virtualboxid=$(VBoxManage list vms | grep $box | cut -d' ' -f2); echo -n $virtualboxid > .vagrant/machines/$box/virtualbox/id; done

– Doloritas 2/1, 2018 at 7:44

When running VBoxManage list vms on Windows, if you get an error "VBoxManage: command not found", you can try this instead: "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage" list vms – Dog 16/8, 2018 at 15:51

Works with Vagrant 2.x also. btw, if using Vim, be sure to :set binary and :set noeol so it won't add a newline at the end. – Theologize 12/8, 2019 at 12:26

Thank you, this fixed my issue too. I had a cluster so I just copied over all the machine directories in the machines directory. – Frederik 21/12, 2021 at 18:54

M

91

WARNING: The solution below works for Vagrant 1.0.x but not Vagrant 1.1+.

Vagrant uses the ".vagrant" file in the same directory as your "Vagrantfile" to track the UUID of your VM. This file will not exist if a VM does not exist. The format of the file is JSON. It looks like this if a single VM exists:

{
   "active":{
      "default":"02f8b71c-75c6-4f33-a161-0f46a0665ab6"
   }
}