Provisioning with Other Tools

Of course, we understand that not everyone uses Chef or Puppet. Vagrant allows for custom provisioners to easily be written and used in place (or alongside) the built-in ones by extending the Vagrant::Provisioners::Base class and using that class as the provisioner.

Creating Your Own Provisioner

The Chef Solo, Chef Server, and Puppet provisioners aren’t anything special; they simply inherit from the Vagrant::Provisioners::Base class. They are also given a special ruby symbol shortcut such as :chef_solo and :puppet since they are built into Vagrant, but thats only for ease of use.

You can create your own provisioner by extending from the base. The methods you’re supposed to implement are prepare and provision!. Neither methods take any arguments.

The prepare Method

The prepare method can be used to configure any shared folders or to verify settings. An example implementation of the prepare method is shown below:

class FooProvisioner < Vagrant::Provisioners::Base
  def prepare
    # Maybe we need to share a folder?
    env.config.vm.share_folder("foo-folder", "/tmp/foo-provisioning",
                                             "/path/to/host/folder")
  end
end

The provision! Method

The provision! method is called when the VM is ready to be provisioned. At this point, the VM can be assumed to be booted and running with the shared folders setup. During this method, the provisioner should SSH and do any commands it is required to do to provision. An example implementation is shown below:

class FooProvisioner < Vagrant::Provisioners::Base
  def provision!
    vm.ssh.execute do |ssh|
      ssh.exec!("sudo foo-provision")
    end
  end
end

Custom Configuration

Provisioners often require configuration, such as specifying paths to scripts, parameters to scripts, etc. Vagrant allows 3rd party provisioners to plug into the Vagrantfile config mechanism as 1st-class citizens. An example of doing this is shown below:

class FooProvisioner < Vagrant::Provisioners::Base
  # Vagrant automatically finds a class named "Config" namespaced
  # beneath the provisioner, and uses it!
  class Config < Vagrant::Config::Base
    attr_accessor :chunky_bacon
  end
end

Vagrant automatically finds a class named Config within the namespace of your provisioner and will use it to configure the provisioner. Example:

require 'foo_provisioner'

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vm.provision FooProvisioner do |foo|
    foo.chunky_bacon = "yes, please"
  end
end

And finally, within the provisioner itself, this configuration can be used in both the prepare and the provision! method:

class FooProvisioner < Vagrant::Provisioners::Base
  def provision!
    if config.foo.chunky_bacon
      env.ui.info "Chunky bacon is on."
    end
  end
end

Enabling and Executing

Telling Vagrant to use your custom provisioner is extremely easy. Assuming you use the above FooProvisioner in a file “foo_provisioner.rb” you simply configure the Vagrantfile like so:

require 'foo_provisioner'

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vm.provision FooProvisioner
end

As always, simply running a vagrant up or vagrant reload at this point will begin the process.