Avoid reprovisioning a Vagrant VM if it is already provisioned

Question

I am trying to get a shell provisioner to avoid reprovisioning a VM instance if it has already done so previously.

Consider the following Vagrantfile:

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vm.define :minimal do |config|
    # Base image
    config.vm.box = "lucid32"
    config.vm.box_url = "http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box"

    config.vm.provision :shell, :inline => "mkdir /tmp/foobar"
  end
end

If you run vagrant up minimal, it will create the box and provision it initially. If you then run vagrant provision minimal it will attempt to reprovision the box but will fail (since the /tmp/foobar directory already exists).

Is there a way to make Vagrant remember whether it has provisioned a machine in the past and to avoid reprovisioning it later?

More context: If I run vagrant up minimal, restart my host machine, and then run vagrant up minimal again, it will try to reprovision the box and fail. This happens reasonably often since VirtualBox frequently causes kernel panics on my host machine.

Answer 1

This might not be the answer you want, but if you change that mkdir to a mkdir -p, it will work ;)

In all seriousness, though, I think Vagrant expects provisioners to be idempotent (that is, if run the second time, it will take no action).

It might be tricky to achieve true idempotency, depending on what you're actually doing in your provisioning script, but mkdir -p is a good start. You could also create a flag file on the system, and check existence of that flag file first thing; if it exists, just exit 0.