Auto-install vagrant-vbguest and vagrant-hostsupdater plugins

[geerlingguy]

Issue Type

• Feature Idea

Summary

I noticed in this example, a Vagrantfile was automatically installing a required plugin as part of the vagrant up routine.

Since there's probably an issue or two a month where someone runs into a version combination that causes issues (e.g. box version 1.0.9 has VB guest additions for 5.1.22, but the user has 5.1.24 installed...), it might be good to at least forcefully install the vagrant-vbguest plugin.

Such code would be like:

unless Vagrant.has_plugin?("vagrant-vbguest")
  system("vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest")
  puts "Dependencies installed, please try the command again."
  exit
end

(Not sure if we need to exit—can Vagrant use a plugin that's installed during a Vagrant run?)

Any major downside to this? Some super-vigilant people might not need the plugin... but I have it installed, and I'm the one building these base boxes!

[geerlingguy]

This would help clear up on of the few major hurdles that seems to affect people, e.g. #1378

[oxyc]

Also see this PR over at trellis roots/trellis#829

[geerlingguy]

Dang, they're all fancy over there in trellis... I would like to basically do as they do, and by default have:

• vagrant-vbguest
• vagrant-hostsupdater

Arguments could be made to also install vagrant-cachier by default... but maybe not.

[oxyc]

I've had some odd bugs with vagrant-cachier (albeit I don't treat my VM's well while testing) so personally I would probably remove it if it was a default.

[geerlingguy]

I've had some odd bugs with vagrant-cachier

Good, so it's not just me :) That's a good argument for not including it as default.

[heddn]

I've had issues with cachier too. The others are fine to install by default. I'd almost add vagrant-auto_network and/or vagrant-bindfs. And not required, but vagrant-hostmanager is also pretty sweet.

[frob]

I would argue vagrant-hostupdater as optional as well. We sometimes need to edit our host files manually and programs, such as gasmask on mac, can be troublesome with hostupdater.

[oxyc]

My vote still goes for including vagrant-hostsupdater by default. Mostly because it removes another step from the quick start guide. I added it as a separate commit in case we want to drop it though.

Out of curiosity, why use gasmask rather than just editing the file yourself?

[geerlingguy]

hostsupdater will be a default, as I think the 80% use case (I'd argue for 99+%) requires it for simplicity. But it's easy enough to override by overriding the plugin list in your own config.yml, local.config.yml, etc.

[geerlingguy]

Fixed via merged PR from @oxyc - thanks!

[frob]

If it is overwritable then I would also argue for including it. How would it be overwritten?

[oxyc]

Add this to your config.yml:

vagrant_plugins:
  - name: vagrant-vbguest

[frob]

Okay, so just redefine the vagrant_plugins. I was thinking it might be a black list or something. Thank you.

We should add that to the docs: PR #1402