How to ssh to vagrant without actually running "vagrant ssh"?

E

17

190

I would like to reproduce the way Vagrant logs in to my VM within a shell script using an ssh command, so I create an alias to my Vagrant instance.

What is the command syntax to use the regular ssh command to access it?

Eulogistic answered 2/6, 2012 at 17:16 Comment(3)

What is it you're actually asking, I see three different things being asked, maybe you could expand the question then flag to migrate. Thanks. – Menes 5/6, 2012 at 22:48

By default the ssh port of VM which is -22 will be forwarded to 2222 on host machine. I putty-ed on 127.0.0.1 and port 2222 with SSH and it worked! – Birdsall 14/6, 2012 at 17:14

If you're running more than one box, that port number will change automatically. You can get the right one by running vagrant ssh-config. – Piscatory 17/10, 2012 at 16:5

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116

I've had to re-implement "vagrant ssh" because it's -c option didn't pass on arguments properly. This is basically what it does (there might be more, but it works fine this way)

#!/bin/sh
PORT=$(vagrant ssh-config | grep Port | grep -o '[0-9]\+')
ssh -q \
    -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null \
    -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no \
    -i ~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key \
    vagrant@localhost \
    -p $PORT \
    "$@"

As a one-liner (with thanks to kgadek):

ssh $(vagrant ssh-config | awk 'NR>1 {print " -o "$1"="$2}') localhost

To account for when you have more than one vagrant host, this will select the desired host, as well as cull blank lines from the config (using sed):

HOST=name-of-my-host
ssh $(vagrant ssh-config $HOST | sed '/^[[:space:]]*$/d' |  awk 'NR>1 {print " -o "$1"="$2}') localhost

Piscatory answered 17/10, 2012 at 16:4 Comment(8)

This answer doesn't let you ssh to your Vagrant from outside the Vagrantfile directory ("using the regular ssh command"), which is how I interpreted the question. – Anchie 4/9, 2014 at 2:39

You could set the port on your own. Thus the script will be executable from any directory. – Monomolecular 15/12, 2014 at 12:54

So, what is making that port a way to get in to the machine? Where is the configuration of what port it is? – Artilleryman 23/10, 2015 at 17:45

Vagrant chooses an unused one with the auto_correct: true setting. Here's more info on how to change it manually – Piscatory 23/10, 2015 at 17:53

I had to skip first line, ie. the Host entry. The modified command is: ssh $(vagrant ssh-config | awk 'NR>1 {print " -o "$1"="$2}') localhost – Reliquiae 20/11, 2015 at 17:49

If your Vagrantfile defines multiple vagrant guest containers as mine does, this will not work. You need to change the code to select which host you intend to connect to. – Valuer 16/12, 2016 at 16:56

The one-liner was just what I needed. I am making a tmuxinator setup script that needs to log in to the same vagrant box on multiple panes, but vagrant ssh has a global lock - one process at a time only. ssh itself has no such lock, so using your one-liner let me bypass that limitation. – Goddaughter 4/8, 2017 at 11:49

vagrant ssh works fine as far as I can tell, what is this – Collier 21/9, 2020 at 0:23

Z

219

There's a lot of answers already, but they all seem overly complicated or solve problems the asker didn't have.

simply:

# save the config to a file
vagrant ssh-config > vagrant-ssh

# run ssh with the file.
ssh -F vagrant-ssh default

Zoophyte answered 15/5, 2014 at 17:58 Comment(6)

That is amazing. Mind adding vagrant-ssh file in .gitignore. – Haydenhaydn 2/5, 2017 at 15:33

With some shells (e.g. zsh), the following one-liner works: ssh -F =(vagrant ssh-config) default – Keyek 30/8, 2017 at 16:17

You might want echo this result into your ssh config file: vagrant ssh-config >> ~/.ssh/config , so you just run ssh default from anywhere in your system, where default is the name of the VM that you can specify like here – Punak 4/9, 2018 at 19:32

Thanks @Punak this is the simplified way which also works for automated solutions where adding extra ssh parameter -F is not straightforward – Adalai 2/2, 2019 at 16:33

By adding an entry to the ~/.ssh/config in the way @Punak suggests you can then use the Visual Studio Code Remote - SSH extension to ssh into the Vagrant VM and edit files and do remote development. Simply CMD-SHIFT-P then "Remote-SSH: Connect to Host..." and the ssh .config entry you just added is automatically listed - you simply select it and voila, vscode connects to your remote vagrant vm! Without the config entry approach, I'm not sure how else I would have done it with vscode. – Mcinerney 3/8, 2019 at 2:4

Great answer. Super easy. The only problem I had was my encoding was wrong. But a simple here took care of the problem. #55694354 – Riata 11/3, 2022 at 12:9

P

116

I've had to re-implement "vagrant ssh" because it's -c option didn't pass on arguments properly. This is basically what it does (there might be more, but it works fine this way)

#!/bin/sh
PORT=$(vagrant ssh-config | grep Port | grep -o '[0-9]\+')
ssh -q \
    -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null \
    -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no \
    -i ~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key \
    vagrant@localhost \
    -p $PORT \
    "$@"

As a one-liner (with thanks to kgadek):

ssh $(vagrant ssh-config | awk 'NR>1 {print " -o "$1"="$2}') localhost

To account for when you have more than one vagrant host, this will select the desired host, as well as cull blank lines from the config (using sed):

HOST=name-of-my-host
ssh $(vagrant ssh-config $HOST | sed '/^[[:space:]]*$/d' |  awk 'NR>1 {print " -o "$1"="$2}') localhost