Shell Provisioner

Provisioner key: :shell

The shell provisioner is the most basic provisioner, and allows you to upload and execute a shell script as the root user in the VM.

This is ideal for new users to Vagrant who don’t want to deal with the burden of learning an advanced system such as Puppet or Chef, or perhaps for users who want to use this in addition to Chef or Puppet to perform some task before or after that provisioner runs.

Specifying the Path

This provisioner has one main configuration option: path. This should be a path to the local shell script. This can be a relative path, and if so, it will be expanded relative to the location of the Vagrantfile. For the remainder of this page, lets assume we have a file named test.sh in the same directory of the Vagrantfile with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash

echo Hello, World!

To configure and run this provisioner, the following would be added to the Vagrantfile:

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vm.provision :shell, :path => "test.sh"
end

This will cause the test.sh file to be executed. Vagrant also shuttles the stderr and stdout output to the host console for your convenience.

Inline Scripts

If you have a quick, short script you want to execute, or perhaps your script exists in a Ruby variable somehow in your Vagrantfile, you can specify the script inline right in your Vagrantfile:

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vm.provision :shell, :inline => "echo foo > /vagrant/test"
end

Script Arguments

You can also pass arguments to the script via the args configuration parameter. The args are expected to be a string that would be typed as-is onto the command line, so be sure to escape anything which should be escaped. Example:

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vm.provision :shell do |shell|
    shell.inline = "echo $1 > /vagrant/test"
    shell.args = "'write this to a file'"
  end
end