Can I modify the ownership for a shared folder in vagrant?

Question

I use vagrant and chef to develop my own blog in a virtual machine. To have easy access to the wordpress folder I created a shared folder.

Basically the wordpress folder is on my host and gets mounted as shared folder in /var/www/wordpress in the VM. The configuration is similar to:

config.vm.share_folder "foo", "/guest/path", "/host/path"

My problem is that the ownership in my VM is always vagrant:vagrant even if I change it on my host. Ownership changes in the VM get ignored.

I cannot use chown to set the ownership of the upload directory to www-data:www-data.

It is possible to use chmod and change the access restrictions to 777, but this is a really ugly hack.

Here is what I actually want. Is this possible?:

Development: Access to the shared folder from my host.
Access Restriction: On the VM all files and folders should have proper and secure ownership and access restrictions.

score 42 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 14 '13 at 13:02

42

As @StephenKing suggests you can change the options of the whole directory.

The relevant function is not documented but the source tells us:

# File 'lib/vagrant/config/vm.rb', line 53

def share_folder(name, guestpath, hostpath, opts=nil)
  @shared_folders[name] = {
    :guestpath => guestpath.to_s,
    :hostpath => hostpath.to_s,
    :create => false,
    :owner => nil,
    :group => nil,
    :nfs   => false,
    :transient => false,
    :extra => nil
  }.merge(opts || {})
end

Basically you can set group, owner and acl for the whole folder which is way better than setting everything to world writable on the host. I have not found any method to change the ownership of a nested directory.

Here is a quickfix:

config.vm.share_folder "v-wordpress", "/var/www/wordpress", "/host/path", :owner => "www-data", :group => "www-data"

edited Apr 14 '13 at 13:02

pixelistik

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answered Nov 26 '12 at 16:39

ayckoster

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Any idea how to do this with vagrant 1.2+? I believe the relevant file (for Virtualbox) is now plugins/providers/virtualbox/action/share_folders.rb. – Johntron Jul 16 '13 at 23:23
Multiple shared_folders on common intersecting directories seem to take into account the last definition. So for nested directories, you would simply add the directive (with `owner:` & `group:`) after – Pierre de LESPINAY Apr 13 '15 at 09:21
For NFS mounted drives, use `config.vm.synced_folder` – Kirkland Jul 08 '16 at 15:11

score 16 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 31 '13 at 12:16

16

@john-syrinek

in 1.2+

config.vm.synced_folder "src/", "/srv/website",
  owner: "root", group: "root"

http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/synced-folders/basic_usage.html

answered Oct 31 '13 at 12:16

Sean Burlington

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one thing worth noting is if you want to change permissions on the default synced_folder you need to use the syntax from this answer, http://stackoverflow.com/a/18390884/704647, which is: config.vm.synced_folder "./", "/vagrant", owner: 'root', group: 'root' – MatthewLee Mar 10 '14 at 21:46

score 9 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 26 '12 at 15:55

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You can allow changing the ownership inside the guest:

config.vm.share_folder "foo", "/guest/path", "/host/path", {:extra => 'dmode=777,fmode=777'}

answered Nov 26 '12 at 15:55

StephenKing

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using Vagrant 1.5.4, this approach didn't work for me. I added the above to my `.kitchen.yml`, modified my `custom_app` cookbook to call `sudo chown -R kevin /my/path/share`. Then I destroyed and provisioned my box again. yet `vagrant` still owns `/my/path/share`. Additionally, I tried the above command manually in the VM, yet the owner is still `vagrant. – Kevin Meredith Apr 29 '14 at 15:36
1

Using 1.7.4 I need to change this to `config.vm.synced_folder ..., {:mount_options => [dmode=777, fmode=777]` – Alwin Kesler Feb 29 '16 at 14:01
To make your vagrant box run a little bit more like a production server would, run `dmode=775,fmode=664` instead of 777. Now when you deploy you should run into one less issue, because you're not depending on global write permissions. – Kirkland Jul 08 '16 at 15:13

score 4 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 23 '19 at 16:46

As the other answers have pointed out you should probably set the correct owner and group using the owner and group configuration options.

However, sometimes that won't work (for example when the target user is only created later on during provision). In these cases, you can remount the share:

sudo mount -t vboxsf -o uid=`id -u www-data`,gid=`id -g www-data` /path/to/share /path/to/share

score 3 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 05 '13 at 17:23

Following up on @StephenKing and @aycokoster awesome tips, I had a use-case for mounting another directory read-only.

I added

config.vm.share_folder "foo", "/guest/path", "/host/path", :extra => 'ro'

and

# discard exit status because chown `id -u vagrant`:`id -g vagrant` /host/path is okay

vagrant up || true

Can I modify the ownership for a shared folder in vagrant?

5 Answers5

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