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Issues with Vagrant's --machine-readable mode

This document is a quick-reference for issues encountered when using the --machine-readable flag with the vagrant binary. I have begun contributing fixes to Vagrant itself to clean up the output and fix these edge cases. This file exists during initial development of the project for ease of reference.

Getting local Vagrant version

There are two ways to read the locally installed Vagrant version:

vagrant --version

vagrant version

The latter method supports the --machine-readable flag, but also makes a network request to the Hashicorp servers to check the latest version available. This introduces some unnecessary lag, as we don't really care what the next version of Vagrant is.

However, the former method of seeking the version doesn't support the --machine-readable flag, so its output can't be parsed in regular fashion - I'd have to bypass regular execution and regex the output.

It would be nice if either the first method could support machine readable output, or the second method could gain a flag to suppress update checks.

Destroying the box

When attempting to destroy a box with the --machine-readable flag, the following error occurs. It does not occur when the --force flag is also added. This is because vagrant destroy will normally prompt the user to confirm VM destruction, which the machine-readable output cannot handle. This isn't really a bug, but perhaps the --machine-readable flag should imply --force?

1556436418,,error-exit,Vagrant::Errors::UIExpectsTTY,Vagrant is attempting to interface with the UI in a way that requires\na TTY. Most actions in Vagrant that require a TTY have configuration\nswitches to disable this requirement. Please do that or run Vagrant\nwith TTY.

Installing plugins with multiple version constraints

According to the Vagrant docs it is possible to specify upper and lower bounds for a plugin's version. However, whenever I do this using the format shown in the docs, an error occurs. A single upper or lower bound succeeds, and a specific version succeeds. This appears to be a bug in Vagrant or its Ruby dependencies, so I have opened ticket 10877.

Some commands have no machine-readable output

Within Vagrant, different output functions are used for "UI" output, and machine- readable output. It seems that not all functions currently have machine-readable output specified in their plugin files. I have begun submitting patches to Vagrant to correct this, though this may then mean that this extension cannot operate with existing Vagrant versions.

Commands currently not producing useful output

  • global-status
  • validate
  • ssh

Unparsable output when running SSH commands

When passing an SSH command to the guest, the stderr response is dropped directly into the machine-readable output without any formatting, which breaks the hell out of an attempt to parse it. Need to add special-case capture for these when parsing responses.

Documentation

Several areas of the Vagrant documentation related to machine-readable output need updating:

  • The main page describing the mode is out-of-date and has an incomplete list of log line types
  • There is no documentation of error values returned in the error-exit log type
  • Some commands are documented but their pages are not linked in the menu, such as winrm