There are times that you might need / want to use a specific provider for your
Vagrant boxes that differs from VirtualBox or whatever provider you have set on
your VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER environmental variable.
For experienced Ruby users this might seem something trivial to do but since Vagrant’s community is made of people from many different programming languages background, I thought it would be nice to share this little trick I find useful when I need to make sure the VMs goes up with the right provider.
I personally have my VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER set to lxc
by default but there are times that I really don’t want to use Vagrant with lxc.
For instance, when someone opens up a bug report on GitHub what I usually do in case
I’m not able to reproduce on my laptop is to bring up one of the Vagrant VirtualBox
VMs available at vagrant-lxc-vbox-hosts
from scratch and run vagrant-lxc from there as an attempt to reproduce the issue on
a clean and shared working environment that can be booted on any VirtualBox / Vagrant
supported OS (this helps a lot if you are not sitting next to the user that
reported the bug ;)
Because I have forgotten to pass in --provider=virtualbox way too many times
and because other users might have VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER set to something else
(like digitalocean or aws) I ended up adding the line below to the project’s
Vagrantfile:
ENV['VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER'] = 'virtualbox'With that in place I can guarantee that anyone that tries to bring one of those VMs up (myself included) will end up using VirtualBox unless explicitly specified.
UPDATE: This is wrong!
Vagrant 1.7+ has a smart mechanism to handle default providers, please see the
Default Provider section of the documentation at: https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/providers/basic_usage.html
for more