Automate adding hosts entries

[rmccue]

Step 7 of The First Vagrant Up says:

Add a record to your local machine's hosts file

This sucks. 👎

On the other hand, vagrant hostsupdater:

This plugin adds an entry to your /etc/hosts file on the host system.

This does not suck. ✨

You can even specify more than one:

config.hostsupdater.aliases = ["alias.testing.de", "alias2.somedomain.com"]

Although interestingly, Vagrant does error if you don't have the plugin installed. ⚠️ (I'm still investigating how to have this not happen; if anyone has any ideas, please let me know.)

Verdict?

[simonwheatley]

At first glance, I like something like Vagrant DNS more… so the DNS works on the host machine and the Vagrant.

[rmccue]

This is true. I use Puppet personally, which has a host resource that I use instead.

Reasons for hostupdater over Vagrant DNS:

• No extra configuration required, whereas Vagrant DNS seems to require a TLD
• Runs a separate DNS server, which may not be desirable
• OS X only, which is IMO a non-starter (we're working in VMs to get away from system dependency, not add more)

Reasons for Vagrant DNS over hostsupdater:

• Registers hosts both locally and in the VM
• Supports subdomains natively

[danielbachhuber]

We're planning to use hostsupdater + a bit of Ruby to populate the array based on the contents of the projects directory.

[jeremyfelt]

Big +1 for hostsupdater. I think the only barrier with VVV is streamlining the process with which the plugin is installed. We could consider making it a required installation step, but it'd be really slick to quietly skip over it if not available. I'm sure there has to be an if plugin method or Ruby call that can help us.

Also +1 for the Salty way. I'm sure there's a way to read a config file, possibly one that goes hand in hand with #100. If we have to edit Vagrantfile for every host that we add, ugh. :)

@simonwheatley - I've thought about using some kind of internal DNS setup because it is appealing. I think there are too many wildcards for what domains could be setup for testing (I hardly use .dev myself), and DNS can be tough to screw with.

[jeremyfelt]

There's Bindler, a plugin for managing plugin dependencies. This would be fantastic if it didn't become a dependency of its own. :)

[jeremyfelt]

Working with this right now and it appears to work. Will have something to test soon.

if defined? VagrantPlugins::HostsUpdater
    config.hostsupdater.aliases = ["hithere.com"]
end

[jeremyfelt]

The only bummer is that it's kind of ugly after a nice provisioning script and it depending on your machine it most likely requires that you enter a password. Trade off is happiness though, so there's that.

[jeremyfelt]

Thanks for the prod, @rmccue, this is lovely. ✨

[jeremyfelt]

At first glance, I like something like Vagrant DNS more… so the DNS works on the host machine and the Vagrant.

I think we can accomplish this once we have a local config file containing the aliases. It can be parsed via script inside provision.sh and added to the internal hosts file.

[simonwheatley]

At first glance, I like something like Vagrant DNS more… so the DNS works on the host machine and the Vagrant.

I think we can accomplish this once we have a local config file containing the aliases. It can be parsed via script inside provision.sh and added to the internal hosts file.

Sounds great. @danielbachhuber's comment above about populating from some projects folder or similar, sounds interesting and relevant to #100 & #121.

[TheLastCicada]

My concern here is..... do any of these solutions work on Windows?

[jeremyfelt]

My concern here is..... do any of these solutions work on Windows?

Yup, Vagrant Hostsupdater is cross platform. Definitely need some Windows users to test it though. Working great on OSX so far.

[TheLastCicada]

Excellent - would love to hear from a Windows user who could test this!

[jeremyfelt]

Ping @westonruter or @ericmann - you guys up for testing this out?

[westonruter]

I am _NOT_ on Windows ❗❗❗

[johnpbloch]

ROFL

[jeremyfelt]

Woops. :)

How about @rclilly?

[johnpbloch]

Part of me wants to ping Linus on this thread just to see what would happen...

[TheLastCicada]

@ericmann is out of town for the next 2 weeks - he is usually my go-to

[rclilly]

@jeremyfelt @TheLastCicada Yes, I am on Windows! I'll look this over and give it a go and report back.

[rclilly]

The vagrant-hostupdater gets a "Permission denied" error and creation of the VM fails.

Here are the steps I took and the results:

1. vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostsupdater = Success!
2. fresh clone of VVV = Success!
3. vagrant up = Errors :-(

Relevant excerpt from the bash window:

"Provisioning complete in 2420 seconds
External network connection established, packages up to date.
For further setup instructions, visit http://192.168.50.4
[default] Checking for host entries
[default] adding to (C:/Windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts) : 192.168.50.4 vvv # VAGRANT: 7a3abd5b27092bd7cf7b008a149ca69e (default) / e0991462-b86f-4d67-afd7-dd224383b70e
[default] adding to (C:/Windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts) : 192.168.50.4 local.wordpress.dev # VAGRANT: 7a3abd5b27092bd7cf7b008a149ca69e (default) / e0991462-b86f-4d67-afd7-dd224383b70e
[default] adding to (C:/Windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts) : 192.168.50.4 local.wordpress-trunk.dev # VAGRANT: 7a3abd5b27092bd7cf7b008a149ca69e (default) / e0991462-b86f-4d67-afd7-dd224383b70e
[default] adding to (C:/Windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts) : 192.168.50.4 src.wordpress-develop.dev # VAGRANT: 7a3abd5b27092bd7cf7b008a149ca69e (default) / e0991462-b86f-4d67-afd7-dd224383b70e
[default] adding to (C:/Windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts) : 192.168.50.4 build.wordpress-develop.dev # VAGRANT: 7a3abd5b27092bd7cf7b008a149ca69e (default) / e0991462-b86f-4d67-afd7-dd224383b70e
[default] Forcing shutdown of VM...
[default] Destroying VM and associated drives...
E:/Users/Robert-laptop/.vagrant.d/gems/gems/vagrant-hostsupdater-0.0.10/lib/vagrant-hostsupdater/HostsUpdater.rb:77:in `initialize': Permission denied - C:/Windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts (Errno::EACCES)"

I followed this with vagrant halt and then did another vagrant up and got the same results. It looks like vagrant-hostupdater needs some work to be able to deal with Windows permissions.

An unrelated error which occurred is:
"Fatal error: Unable to find local grunt.

If you're seeing this message, either a Gruntfile wasn't found or grunt
hasn't been installed locally to your project. For more information about
installing and configuring grunt, please see the Getting Started guide:

http://gruntjs.com/getting-started"

[rmccue]

I am also a Windows user. :) Since Windows doesn't have sudo or similar, you have to make your hosts file world-writable. Once that's done, it works perfectly.

[rclilly]

Update: opened the bash window/command prompt with "Run as Administrator" and did vagrant up. Everything worked fine, both the vagrant-hostsupdater and the installation of Grunt! I verified that 5 new lines were added to my hosts file, all providing a hostname for 192.168.50.4. Yeah!

Maybe we need to update the instructions for Windows users to always make sure the command prompt/bash window is opened with elevated privileges?

@rmccue How does one make the hosts file world-writable in Windows?

[rclilly]

Update to the update: Verified that the entries to the hosts file are removed upon vagrant halt.

[rmccue]

@rclilly Actually, I didn't make it world-writable, but I gave my user the permissions to edit it without being admin. The easiest way to do it is: Properties -> Security -> Edit -> Add -> [your user] -> Full Control.

Note that when running via Cygwin using PuTTY, you can't run as an administrator, so you need this. For normal users though, running as admin should be fine.

[jeremyfelt]

Seems like we're good to go here, so I'm going to close this out.

[jeremyfelt]

A note for handling this in the future... Vagrant 1.3.0 will have Vagrant.has_plugin? available to use.

[lock]

This thread has been automatically locked since there has not been any recent activity after it was closed. Please open a new issue for related bugs.