Bidirectional Vagrant Rsync

Question

I have configured Vagrant to use Rsync shared folders instead of the (incredibly SLOW) vboxsf filesystem provided by VirtualBox by default:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
    config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", type: "rsync",
        rsync__args: ["--verbose", "--archive", "-z"]
end

Obviously, there's more configuration, but I found these instructions here and they generally work in synchronizing from the host to the guest.

However, I need the guest to be able to sync back to the host, as some of my build tools are only installed on the guest. How can I sync bidirectionally in the shared folder?

Answer 1

Consider using a vagrant plugin https://github.com/smerrill/vagrant-rsync-back#vagrant-rsync-back

Install:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-rsync-back

Run:

vagrant rsync-back

It'll rsync the mapped folders from guest to host

Answer 2

Unfortunately no, quote from documentation:

The rsync synced folder does a one-time one-way sync from the machine running to the machine being started by Vagrant.

so better for you to use NFS (or SMB if using a Windows host)

In some cases the default shared folder implementations (such as VirtualBox shared folders) have high performance penalties. If you're seeing less than ideal performance with synced folders,

Answer 3

Consider using this vagrant plugin http://github.com/dmatora/vagrant-unison It does realtime bidirectional folder sync