Demand a Vagrant plugin within the Vagrantfile?

Question

Supposed execution of a Vagrantfile requires a specific Vagrant plugin to be installed. So, basically what you need to do is

$ vagrant plugin install foobar-plugin
$ vagrant up

If you skip the first step, vagrant up fails.

Is there an option in Vagrant to make it install the plugin automatically? In other words: Is it possible to specify within a Vagrantfile which plugins to install automatically before creating and booting up the machine?

Dissonancy

Answer 1

2019 Update: Vagrant now has functionality to require plugins through the Vagrantfile via:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vagrant.plugins = "vagrant-some-plugin"

  # or as array:
  config.vagrant.plugins = ["vagrant-some-plugin", "vagrant-some-other-plugin"]

  # or as hash
  config.vagrant.plugins = {"vagrant-some-plugin" => {"version" => "1.0.0"}}
end

If Vagrant detects there are plugins not already installed it will prompt the user to install them itself:

$ vagrant up
Vagrant has detected project local plugins configured for this
project which are not installed.

  vagrant-some-plugin
Install local plugins (Y/N) [N]: y
Installing the 'vagrant-some-plugin' plugin. This can take a few minutes...
Fetching vagrant-some-plugin-1.0.0.gem
Installed the plugin 'vagrant-some-plugin (1.0.0)'!


Vagrant has completed installing local plugins for the current Vagrant
project directory. Please run the requested command again.

See https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/vagrantfile/vagrant_settings.html

Rhea

What if I would like to skip the prompt and auto-install all required plugins? – Inexperienced

Answer 2

UPDATE Aug 31, 2018: See @Starx's fix below for later versions of Vagrant (1.8 and above)

Here is version based on Louis St. Amour's solution together with Rob Kinyon's comment about re-exec if a new plugin was installeed, I use it successfully in my own setup:

required_plugins = %w(vagrant-share vagrant-vbguest...)

plugins_to_install = required_plugins.select { |plugin| not Vagrant.has_plugin? plugin }
if not plugins_to_install.empty?
  puts "Installing plugins: #{plugins_to_install.join(' ')}"
  if system "vagrant plugin install #{plugins_to_install.join(' ')}"
    exec "vagrant #{ARGV.join(' ')}"
  else
    abort "Installation of one or more plugins has failed. Aborting."
  end
end

Kourtneykovac

Definitely the best solution at the moment – Darsie

I've updated the solution on April 20th to use only one "system" call to install all missing plugins. – Kourtneykovac

This did not work. It went into an infinite loop of installing the plugins. Somehow the new vagrant process can not pick up the newly installed plugins in the parent vagrant process – Colb

@ArifAkramKhan I added a check of the system() exit status. The code will now re-exec only if the installation of new plugins succeeded, otherwise it will abort. – Kourtneykovac

Thanks for the update. I actually ended up following the solution suggested by mkuzmin here: github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/4347. It involves using a plugin named vagrant plugins and then use some code (very similar to you) in Vagrantfile. – Colb

In the absence of something built-in to vagrant, this is a life-saver for keeping the pure simplicity of 'vagrant up.' I'm no Ruby / Vagrant dev, but it would be nice to see this packaged as a plugin, yeah? ... to hide the implementation and make the syntax more sugary! :-) – Violinist

@SteveHenty I sympathise with your comment but moving this into a plugin will sort of defeat the purpose of the code (of just being able to git clone...; cd ...; vagrant up first time around). – Kourtneykovac

I still get a nasty loop when I try this. Same for similar code in other answers. – Wernsman

@Wernsman what do you expect to happen with this comment? Either provide more details or debug it yourself. – Kourtneykovac

@AmosShapira, it's for the information of other people coming across this in future. I'm pointing out that the answer is likely out of date. I'm not expecting anything to "happen". – Wernsman

@Wernsman what version of Vagrant, Ruby and OS do you got problems with? Can you provide minimal instructions to replicate your issue? – Kourtneykovac

@AmosShapira, sure. Vagrant 2.1.2 (latest), ruby 2.5.1p57 (may have been installed from homebrew?), OS X 10.12.6. My assumption was that this 2-year-old answer was simply not compatible with recent Vagrant. – Wernsman

Answer 3

Since I'm a Ruby dev, and Bindler is no longer being maintained, I found it most natural to just write some code at the top of my Vagrantfile to install required plugins if missing (e.g. before Vagrant.configure line)

The following works for me:

required_plugins = %w( vagrant-hostmanager vagrant-someotherplugin )
required_plugins.each do |plugin|
  system "vagrant plugin install #{plugin}" unless Vagrant.has_plugin? plugin
end

system, unlike using backticks, will echo the command to stdout, just as running the command yourself would. And this way I don't need yet another strangely named plugin or system to keep track of required plugins which can be updated by Vagrant anyway.

Rowel

You'll need to 'exec "vagrant #{ARGV.join' '}"' in order to restart the vagrant process with the plugin installed. – Crinkly

Good point. In my case I'd hit an error, but see the installing plugin's output and know to re-run the command. Having it re-run automatically would be an even better enhancement. If re-writing it, perhaps I would check to see if any plugin was not installed, and if so, install the plugins first then re-run the script rather than check and install each plugin one at a time... – Rowel

It would be awesome to have Vagrant.has_plugin? command on the shell level or just have vagrant plugin install check if plugin is already there. – Appointee

Well you could always do something like if [ $(vagrant plugin list | egrep 'vagrant-hostsupdater|vagrant-share' -c) == 2 ] ; then echo "All plugins installed." ; else echo "Missing plugin"; fi but there's a reason nobody writes bash scripts if they can help it ;-) Maybe experiment with the vagrant plugin command further? – Rowel

Answer 4

As I pointed out on my answer to your other question, you can use bindler for installing a set of plugins specific to a project using a single command.

If bindler is installed and the required plugin is not, bindler will error out and will abort the process. There is also an open issue related to automatically installing plugins on vagrant ups but so far no one signed up for it yet.

If you don't want to use bindler, you can make use of Vagrant.has_plugin? (available on 1.3.0+) at the top of your Vagrantfile and error out if the required plugin is not installed.

Something like:

unless Vagrant.has_plugin?("vagrant-some-plugin")
  raise 'some-plugin is not installed!'
end

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "box-name"
end

---

UPDATE: Bindler is no longer supported and no equivalent funcionality has been provided by Vagrant core as of May 11th, 2015

Ecumenicity

For future Googlers, please note that this answer is a little outdated. You can now specify your dependencies in your Gemfile under a :plugins group that Vagrant will check for. See my answer below for more details. – Trexler

Gemfile is intended for Vagrant plugin development. See github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/8370 – Advice

Answer 5

Please note that as of Vagrant 1.5, you can specify your dependencies in your Gemfile. Per the blog post on the update:

Now, Vagrant 1.5 will automatically load any gems in the "plugins" group in your Gemfile. As an example, here is the Gemfile for a "vagrant-bar" plugin:

source "https://rubygems.org"

group :development do
  gem "vagrant",
    git: "https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant.git"
end

group :plugins do
  gem "vagrant-foo",
  gem "vagrant-bar", path: "."
end

Trexler

Isn't that blog post referring to Vagrant plugin development? Vagrant boxes do not generally have Gemfiles, they use Vagrantfiles. – Copyboy

You are correct that Vagrant boxes do not have Gemfiles per se (you could have a Vagrantfile that did not require any plugins), but if you are using plugins (the context of the blog was as dependencies for your own plugin, but the same holds true for Vagrantfiles), you should be using a Gemfile to specify those requirements. – Trexler

Thanks, that's helpful. Since many Vagrant users are not ruby devs and will not already have a Gemfile, would you mind explaining how you set that up? I've created one similar to your example, but vagrant up isn't automatically loading anything. Tried bundle install but that's giving a prompt about system Rubygems permissions, which doesn't sound right. – Copyboy

I'm guessing that you're working in OSX using the stock ruby install, and running into this problem: stackoverflow.com/questions/14607193? – Trexler

In the world of chef cookbooks, very few will have a gemfile – Stedmann

@Stedmann while this may be true, plugins are gems, and you're including them in your project, so using a Gemfile is the standard. While we could argue over whether or not Vagrant should have this kind of thing baked in, the fact is that there is an established way of including these things. – Trexler

For those curious about how to create a Gemfile, once the bundle command is installed via gem install bundler, you should be able to bundle init to create a (relatively-blank) Gemfile in your current directory. These gems can be git repos or rubygems, even branches of git repos or tagged to specific versions/commits and are installed using bundle install for that specific folder or app's gem requirements. I've no idea how they work with Vagrant, just thought I'd share some background info. – Rowel

// , @LouisSt-Amour Most of us don't have ruby – Same

Answer 6

Couldn't add a comment to Louis St-Amour's answer, but I wanted to post this just in case anyone needed help extending his solution.

# Check for missing plugins
required_plugins = %w(vagrant-list)
plugin_installed = false
required_plugins.each do |plugin|
  unless Vagrant.has_plugin?(plugin)
    system "vagrant plugin install #{plugin}"
    plugin_installed = true
  end
end

# If new plugins installed, restart Vagrant process
if plugin_installed === true
  exec "vagrant #{ARGV.join' '}"
end

Kinetics

// , Note that vagrant-list in the above is an example of a plugin, not a necessary part of the code. You can see other Vagrant plugins here: vagrant-lists.github.io – Same

Answer 7

On the new version of Vagrant, answer by @Amos Shapira gets stuck in an infinite loop. The reason for that is each call to vagrant plugin install also processes the Vagrantfile and when processed executes the code relating to installing the plugin again and again and so on.

Here is my solution which avoids the loop.

# Plugins
#
# Check if the first argument to the vagrant
# command is plugin or not to avoid the loop
if ARGV[0] != 'plugin'

  # Define the plugins in an array format
  required_plugins = [
    'vagrant-vbguest', 'vagrant-hostmanager', 
    'vagrant-disksize'
  ]         
  plugins_to_install = required_plugins.select { |plugin| not Vagrant.has_plugin? plugin }
  if not plugins_to_install.empty?

    puts "Installing plugins: #{plugins_to_install.join(' ')}"
    if system "vagrant plugin install #{plugins_to_install.join(' ')}"
      exec "vagrant #{ARGV.join(' ')}"
    else
      abort "Installation of one or more plugins has failed. Aborting."
    end

  end
end

Addiel

Answer 8

I just noticed here http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/plugins/packaging.html an instruction

Vagrant.require_plugin "vagrant-aws"

which does exactly the same thing as what descibed fgrehm: raising quickly an error if the plugin is not installed.

As far as I know, there are stil no way to auto-install plugins

Hawkes

Vagrant.require_plugin has been deprecated on 1.5+ – Reeves

Here's the official blog post about the deprecation: vagrantup.com/blog/vagrant-1-5-plugin-improvements.html From my limited understanding, it was deprecated because it's no longer necessary, Vagrant will now automatically check plugin dependancies. Not fully confident that I understand the blog post though... – Singer

The post talks automatically checking plugin dependencies, but I haven't seen anything about dependencies of the Vagrant box itself. – Copyboy

Vagrant.require_plugin is deprecated. Checked with Vagrant 1.7.4. – Hanoverian

Answer 9

My answer is very close to Louis St-Amour's answer, but instead of installing plugins automatically, it just raises an error message, so that the user has to install the plugin manually.

I would rather users be aware of any plugins that get installed, because they apply globally to all Vagrant instances, not just to the current Vagrantfile.

Put at the top of Vagrantfile one line like this for each plugin, in this example, vagrant-vbguest:

 raise "vagrant-vbguest plugin must be installed" unless Vagrant.has_plugin? "vagrant-vbguest"

Lector

Answer 10

You could use this project (I am the author): https://github.com/DevNIX/Vagrant-dependency-manager

It's based on similar answers but trying to be more complete and stable. The big advantage of this idea is, you can distribute your Vagrantfile and it will run on every computer regardless of the installed plugins on that environment.

It is easy to use:

1. Copy dependency_manager.rb next to your Vagrantfile

2. Include it and call check_plugins passing your dependencies as an array

   Example:

   # -*- mode: ruby -*-
   # vi: set ft=ruby :
   
   require File.dirname(__FILE__)+"./dependency_manager"
   
   check_plugins ["vagrant-exec", "vagrant-hostsupdater", "vagrant-cachier", "vagrant-triggers"]
   
   Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
   
     config.vm.box = "base"
   
   end
   

3. ???

4. Profit!

I would love to merge pull requests, fix any issue you could have, and to get ideas of new features. Currently I'm thinking about updating the dependency manager itself, and requiring specific plugin versions :D

Regards!

Toby

Answer 11

I got a problem with new install of Vagrant, where .vagrant.d directory is not created yet. I was able to make the snippet from Luis St. Amour working by catching the exception.

required_plugins = %w(vagrant-share vagrant-vbguest)

begin
    plugins_to_install = required_plugins.select { |plugin| not Vagrant.has_plugin? plugin }
    if not plugins_to_install.empty?
        puts "Installing plugins: #{plugins_to_install.join(' ')}"
        if system "vagrant plugin install #{plugins_to_install.join(' ')}"
            exec "vagrant #{ARGV.join(' ')}"
        else
            abort "Installation of one or more plugins has failed. Aborting."
        end
    end
rescue
    exec "vagrant #{ARGV.join(' ')}"
end

Rajasthan

On Windows this gives me the error "Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider... but another process is already executing an action on the machine" because up is being run by up. Is there any way to avoid this without running vagrant up twice? – Heartbreaking

Answer 12

Here's what I am using on Vagrant 1.8 and it is working fine. Put this somewhere before the configure block in your Vagrantfile.

# install required plugins if necessary
if ARGV[0] == 'up'
    # add required plugins here
    required_plugins = %w( plugin1 plugin2 plugin3 )
    missing_plugins = []
    required_plugins.each do |plugin|
        missing_plugins.push(plugin) unless Vagrant.has_plugin? plugin
    end

    if ! missing_plugins.empty?
        install_these = missing_plugins.join(' ')
        puts "Found missing plugins: #{install_these}.  Installing using sudo..."
        exec "sudo vagrant plugin install #{install_these}; vagrant up"
    end
end

Illfated

It appears that's not cross-platform. – Tronna