Demand a Vagrant plugin within the Vagrantfile?

Question

Supposed execution of a Vagrantfile requires a specific Vagrant plugin to be installed. So, basically what you need to do is

$ vagrant plugin install foobar-plugin
$ vagrant up

If you skip the first step, vagrant up fails.

Is there an option in Vagrant to make it install the plugin automatically? In other words: Is it possible to specify within a Vagrantfile which plugins to install automatically before creating and booting up the machine?

Answer 1

UPDATE Aug 31, 2018: See @Starx's fix below for later versions of Vagrant (1.8 and above)

Here is version based on Louis St. Amour's solution together with Rob Kinyon's comment about re-exec if a new plugin was installeed, I use it successfully in my own setup:

required_plugins = %w(vagrant-share vagrant-vbguest...)

plugins_to_install = required_plugins.select { |plugin| not Vagrant.has_plugin? plugin }
if not plugins_to_install.empty?
  puts "Installing plugins: #{plugins_to_install.join(' ')}"
  if system "vagrant plugin install #{plugins_to_install.join(' ')}"
    exec "vagrant #{ARGV.join(' ')}"
  else
    abort "Installation of one or more plugins has failed. Aborting."
  end
end

Answer 2

Since I'm a Ruby dev, and Bindler is no longer being maintained, I found it most natural to just write some code at the top of my Vagrantfile to install required plugins if missing (e.g. before Vagrant.configure line)

The following works for me:

required_plugins = %w( vagrant-hostmanager vagrant-someotherplugin )
required_plugins.each do |plugin|
  system "vagrant plugin install #{plugin}" unless Vagrant.has_plugin? plugin
end

system, unlike using backticks, will echo the command to stdout, just as running the command yourself would. And this way I don't need yet another strangely named plugin or system to keep track of required plugins which can be updated by Vagrant anyway.

Answer 3

As I pointed out on my answer to your other question, you can use bindler for installing a set of plugins specific to a project using a single command.

If bindler is installed and the required plugin is not, bindler will error out and will abort the process. There is also an open issue related to automatically installing plugins on vagrant ups but so far no one signed up for it yet.

If you don't want to use bindler, you can make use of Vagrant.has_plugin? (available on 1.3.0+) at the top of your Vagrantfile and error out if the required plugin is not installed.

Something like:

unless Vagrant.has_plugin?("vagrant-some-plugin")
  raise 'some-plugin is not installed!'
end

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "box-name"
end

---

UPDATE: Bindler is no longer supported and no equivalent funcionality has been provided by Vagrant core as of May 11th, 2015

Answer 4

2019 Update: Vagrant now has functionality to require plugins through the Vagrantfile via:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vagrant.plugins = "vagrant-some-plugin"

  # or as array:
  config.vagrant.plugins = ["vagrant-some-plugin", "vagrant-some-other-plugin"]

  # or as hash
  config.vagrant.plugins = {"vagrant-some-plugin" => {"version" => "1.0.0"}}
end

If Vagrant detects there are plugins not already installed it will prompt the user to install them itself:

$ vagrant up
Vagrant has detected project local plugins configured for this
project which are not installed.

  vagrant-some-plugin
Install local plugins (Y/N) [N]: y
Installing the 'vagrant-some-plugin' plugin. This can take a few minutes...
Fetching vagrant-some-plugin-1.0.0.gem
Installed the plugin 'vagrant-some-plugin (1.0.0)'!


Vagrant has completed installing local plugins for the current Vagrant
project directory. Please run the requested command again.

See https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/vagrantfile/vagrant_settings.html

Answer 5

Please note that as of Vagrant 1.5, you can specify your dependencies in your Gemfile. Per the blog post on the update:

Now, Vagrant 1.5 will automatically load any gems in the "plugins" group in your Gemfile. As an example, here is the Gemfile for a "vagrant-bar" plugin:

source "https://rubygems.org"

group :development do
  gem "vagrant",
    git: "https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant.git"
end

group :plugins do
  gem "vagrant-foo",
  gem "vagrant-bar", path: "."
end

Answer 6

Couldn't add a comment to Louis St-Amour's answer, but I wanted to post this just in case anyone needed help extending his solution.

# Check for missing plugins
required_plugins = %w(vagrant-list)
plugin_installed = false
required_plugins.each do |plugin|
  unless Vagrant.has_plugin?(plugin)
    system "vagrant plugin install #{plugin}"
    plugin_installed = true
  end
end

# If new plugins installed, restart Vagrant process
if plugin_installed === true
  exec "vagrant #{ARGV.join' '}"
end

Answer 7

On the new version of Vagrant, answer by @Amos Shapira gets stuck in an infinite loop. The reason for that is each call to vagrant plugin install also processes the Vagrantfile and when processed executes the code relating to installing the plugin again and again and so on.

Here is my solution which avoids the loop.

# Plugins
#
# Check if the first argument to the vagrant
# command is plugin or not to avoid the loop
if ARGV[0] != 'plugin'

  # Define the plugins in an array format
  required_plugins = [
    'vagrant-vbguest', 'vagrant-hostmanager', 
    'vagrant-disksize'
  ]         
  plugins_to_install = required_plugins.select { |plugin| not Vagrant.has_plugin? plugin }
  if not plugins_to_install.empty?

    puts "Installing plugins: #{plugins_to_install.join(' ')}"
    if system "vagrant plugin install #{plugins_to_install.join(' ')}"
      exec "vagrant #{ARGV.join(' ')}"
    else
      abort "Installation of one or more plugins has failed. Aborting."
    end

  end
end

Answer 8

I just noticed here http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/plugins/packaging.html an instruction

Vagrant.require_plugin "vagrant-aws"

which does exactly the same thing as what descibed fgrehm: raising quickly an error if the plugin is not installed.

As far as I know, there are stil no way to auto-install plugins

Answer 9

My answer is very close to Louis St-Amour's answer, but instead of installing plugins automatically, it just raises an error message, so that the user has to install the plugin manually.

I would rather users be aware of any plugins that get installed, because they apply globally to all Vagrant instances, not just to the current Vagrantfile.

Put at the top of Vagrantfile one line like this for each plugin, in this example, vagrant-vbguest:

 raise "vagrant-vbguest plugin must be installed" unless Vagrant.has_plugin? "vagrant-vbguest"

Answer 10

You could use this project (I am the author): https://github.com/DevNIX/Vagrant-dependency-manager

It's based on similar answers but trying to be more complete and stable. The big advantage of this idea is, you can distribute your Vagrantfile and it will run on every computer regardless of the installed plugins on that environment.

It is easy to use:

1. Copy dependency_manager.rb next to your Vagrantfile

2. Include it and call check_plugins passing your dependencies as an array

   Example:

   # -*- mode: ruby -*-
   # vi: set ft=ruby :
   
   require File.dirname(__FILE__)+"./dependency_manager"
   
   check_plugins ["vagrant-exec", "vagrant-hostsupdater", "vagrant-cachier", "vagrant-triggers"]
   
   Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
   
     config.vm.box = "base"
   
   end
   

3. ???

4. Profit!

I would love to merge pull requests, fix any issue you could have, and to get ideas of new features. Currently I'm thinking about updating the dependency manager itself, and requiring specific plugin versions :D

Regards!

Answer 11

I got a problem with new install of Vagrant, where .vagrant.d directory is not created yet. I was able to make the snippet from Luis St. Amour working by catching the exception.

required_plugins = %w(vagrant-share vagrant-vbguest)

begin
    plugins_to_install = required_plugins.select { |plugin| not Vagrant.has_plugin? plugin }
    if not plugins_to_install.empty?
        puts "Installing plugins: #{plugins_to_install.join(' ')}"
        if system "vagrant plugin install #{plugins_to_install.join(' ')}"
            exec "vagrant #{ARGV.join(' ')}"
        else
            abort "Installation of one or more plugins has failed. Aborting."
        end
    end
rescue
    exec "vagrant #{ARGV.join(' ')}"
end

Answer 12

Here's what I am using on Vagrant 1.8 and it is working fine. Put this somewhere before the configure block in your Vagrantfile.

# install required plugins if necessary
if ARGV[0] == 'up'
    # add required plugins here
    required_plugins = %w( plugin1 plugin2 plugin3 )
    missing_plugins = []
    required_plugins.each do |plugin|
        missing_plugins.push(plugin) unless Vagrant.has_plugin? plugin
    end

    if ! missing_plugins.empty?
        install_these = missing_plugins.join(' ')
        puts "Found missing plugins: #{install_these}.  Installing using sudo..."
        exec "sudo vagrant plugin install #{install_these}; vagrant up"
    end
end