chmod fails to alter permissions in Vagrant VM

Question

I am trying to set up a Vagrant environment to host Snowplow (https://github.com/snowplow). When I launch vagrant from a cygwin shell

$vagrant up && vagrant ssh

I get into an Ubuntu guest image (12.04), and when I attempt to install java8 into this environment using ansible, I get this message:

vagrant@precise64:~$ ansible-playbook /vagrant/ansible-playbooks/java8-gradle.yml --inventory-file=/vagrant/home/ansible/ansible_hosts --connection=local ERROR: The file /vagrant/home/ansible/ansible_hosts is marked as executable, but failed to execute correctly. If this is not supposed to be an executable script, correct this with chmod -x /vagrant/home/ansible/ansible_hosts.

The file is indeed 777:

-rwxrwxrwx 1 vagrant vagrant 24 Mar 3 19:03 ansible_hosts*

but this same file is sync'd to the host (Windows) and cygwin shows the file as 644:

-rw-r--r-- 1 rcoe Domain Users 24 Mar 3 14:03 ansible_hosts

Is there a known issue running in a headless (VirtualBox) Vagrant environment that doesn't allow permissions to be set on files that are sync'd to the host?

Thanks.

I forgot to mention that I tried changing the permissions of the file in the guest and it failed to change them. i.e., I tried chmod -x as the error message stipulated, as both the vagrant user and as root. — Robin Coe, Mar 03 '15 at 19:40

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 10 '15 at 04:41

It is a known deficiency, but reportedly not a bug: Changing shared folder permissions from within virtual machine

There is a good tutorial on how to set up the synced folder in vagrant so that it would suit your needs - if you navigate to that link it will show the following snippet

config.vm.synced_folder "./", "/var/sites/dev.query-auth", id: "vagrant-root",
   owner: "vagrant",
   group: "www-data",
   mount_options: ["dmode=775,fmode=664"]

that shows how to adjust the permissions of the synced folder.

Alternatively you could also use a different method of syncing the folder, such as rsync (keeping in mind what the trade-offs are)

config.vm.synced_folder "/Users/ryansechrest/Projects/Sites", "/var/www/domains", 
   type: "rsync"

chmod fails to alter permissions in Vagrant VM

1 Answers1