SSH onto Vagrant Box With Different Username

Question

Rather than ssh-ing onto my Vagrant virtual machine with a "vagrant" user-name and password, I'd like to use kevin/kevin.

I modified my Vagrantfile to include:

config.ssh.username = "kevin"

Then, I ran vagrant reload.

The following output showed up:

[default] Waiting for machine to boot. This may take a few minutes...
Timed out while waiting for the machine to boot. This means that
Vagrant was unable to communicate with the guest machine within
the configured ("config.vm.boot_timeout" value) time period. This can
mean a number of things.

However, I could still ssh onto my vagrant box using vagrant/vagrant, yet I I couldn't ssh onto the box with a user-name and password of kevin/kevin or kevin/vagrant.

Note that I also tried this answer (https://stackoverflow.com/a/9924122/409976), but I could only ssh onto the box with user-name vagrant, not kevin (even though it's specified in the Vagrantfile).

How can I configure my Vagrantfile so that I can ssh using user-name kevin?

If you can ssh in yourself using `vagrant`, but not Kevin, then it sounds like you need to setup the `kevin` user in the guest image. The `Vagrantfile` configuration only establishes the user to use, it does not setup users on the guest. — zanerock, Mar 25 '14 at 19:20

score 70 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:34

70

You can ssh to the box using vagrant but NOT kevin, that's expected.

Most Vagrant base boxes have only 2 users with SSH access, root and vagrant. They both use vagrant as password, in addition, vagrant is configured for public key authentication using the insecure (why? see Vagrant insecure by default?) key pair provided in the Vagrant project on GitHub.

To be able to login as kevin, you'll have to ssh into the box and create the user (useradd -m -s /bin/bash -U kevin) first, configure public key authentication (many ways e.g ssh-copy-id, I'll leave it to you.)

You should be able to ssh into the box after creating the user using vagrant ssh if you properly set config.ssh.username in Vagrantfile.

Of course you can manually ssh into the box by (assume NAT is in use)

ssh -p 2222 kevin@localhost

or (on Linux)

ssh -p 2222 -i /opt/vagrant/embedded/gems/gems/vagrant-1.5.1/keys/vagrant.pub vagrant@localhost

edited May 23 '17 at 12:34

Community

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answered Mar 25 '14 at 23:32

Terry Wang

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Note that I was able to simply create a user (`useradd ...`), destroy & spin up my VM, and then successfully SSH with putty using kevin/kevin log-in. But, I'm a bit confused since, as you had mentioned in "Vagrant insecure by default?," shouldn't `vagrant` and `root` only be able to SSH without keys explicitly configured? – Kevin Meredith Mar 26 '14 at 15:16
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You can ssh into the box with user vagrant, become root and then copy the file /home/vagrant/.ssh/authorized_keys to /home/kevin/.ssh/authorized_keys. Make sure the ownership and the permission of /home/kevin/.ssh/authorized_keys are OK (600 and owner kevin:group of kevin). – Saule Nov 19 '14 at 15:26
@Saule 's comment is the best answer. Thread is old, but the search on this topic brought me here. – rickb Jun 23 '17 at 16:08
I also thought this was a good writeup http://ermaker.github.io/blog/2015/11/18/change-insecure-key-to-my-own-key-on-vagrant.html – Rob Carpenter Mar 23 '18 at 07:24
That link Rob gave **is now dead**, so use [this one](https://web.archive.org/web/20190917175007/https://ermaker.github.io/blog/2015/11/18/change-insecure-key-to-my-own-key-on-vagrant.html), courtesy of the Internet Archive – 0xC0000022L Dec 14 '20 at 16:34
Thank you for the information. I was looking for a valid user login from a while. – Oualid Feb 02 '22 at 19:47

score 29 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 17 '17 at 11:22

Another solution, after adding user to Vagrant via your provisioning script:

## add kevin
useradd -m -s /bin/bash -U kevin -u 666 --groups wheel
cp -pr /home/vagrant/.ssh /home/kevin/
chown -R kevin:kevin /home/kevin
echo "%kevin ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" > /etc/sudoers.d/kevin

add this to your Vagrant file:

VAGRANT_COMMAND = ARGV[0]
if VAGRANT_COMMAND == "ssh"
  config.ssh.username = 'kevin'
end

Now Vagrant will use default vagrant user to provision your VM, but once it's up, you can use simple vagrant ssh to log in as kevin via default Vagrant ssh-key.

This way you can ship your desired Vagrantfile and users just say vagrant up and kevin automatically becomes ready to use.

Do you know how could one store the password as well? Doing config.ssh.password doesn't seem to be doing the trick. Thanks! — jpruiz114, Apr 25 '19 at 15:41

aidanmelen · Answer 3 · 2017-08-13T00:00:44.360

Create a vagrant file like the one below. Note that we are bootstrapping the vagrant user to immediately change to the 'kevin' user that we created.

bootstrap = <<SCRIPT
  useradd -m kevin --groups sudo
  su -c "printf 'cd /home/kevin\nsudo su kevin' >> .bash_profile" -s /bin/sh vagrant
SCRIPT

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "bento/ubuntu-16.04"
  config.vm.host_name = "kevin"
  config.vm.provision "shell", inline: "#{bootstrap}", privileged: true
end

now ssh into the vm:

$ vagrant ssh
Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.0-83-generic x86_64)

 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com
 * Management:     https://landscape.canonical.com
 * Support:        https://ubuntu.com/advantage

0 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.


To run a command as administrator (user "root"), use "sudo <command>".
See "man sudo_root" for details.

kevin@kevin:/home/vagrant$

Nice, I like the self-sufficient nature of this. – 0xC0000022L Dec 14 '20 at 16:31 — 0xC0000022L, Dec 14 '20 at 16:31

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Dec 03 '16 at 01:04

2

A bit of a hack, but you could add the line sudo su - kevin to your .bash_profile file and add kevin to the sudoers file with no password.

This will change the current user to kevin when logging in as the vagrant user from the command line.

The advantage of this approach is that NAT does not need to be enabled.

answered Dec 03 '16 at 01:04

Willem van Ketwich

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7
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this is such a hack! but it is simple and i like it. – aidanmelen Aug 12 '17 at 23:36

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Jun 20 '21 at 08:01

i find a easy way to achieve this by copy the .ssh to the user, such as your user name is alice

sudo su -
cp -r /home/vagrant/.ssh/ /home/alice/
chown -R alice:alice  /home/alice/.ssh

Then add config in the Vagrantfile:

# ...
config.ssh.username = 'alice'
# ...

SSH onto Vagrant Box With Different Username

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