In Vagrant, can I set a provisioner to only ever run manually?

Question

In my Vagrantfile, I have a provisioner like so:

config.vm.provision "reset", type: "shell", run: "always" do |s|
    s.privileged = false
    s.inline = "bash /path/to/my/reset/script.sh"
end

And when normally provisioning vagrant, it runs fine. But what I would like to do, is setup a provisioner that only runs when I manually call it. So if I were to have the following provisioner:

config.vm.provision "otherScript", type: "shell", run: "manual" do |s|
    s.privileged = false
    s.inline = "bash /path/to/my/other/script.sh"
end

I would run it with vagrant provision --provision-with otherScript. I can already do that with other provisioners. But I cannot find a way to make it so when I do things like vagrant provision it skips any with a run setting of manual. I can't find anything in the docs related to it other than that I can use "always".

I have considered using something like fabric or invoke (python 3) but then I would have to set that up on all the computers in my team. Which I can setup with a script, but I figured this may be easier if possible.

Is there a way to accomplish this? To setup a provisioner that only ever runs when I manually call it?

Answer 1

There is a legitimate need for manual/on-demand/explicit provisioners when you need a complex task to be available, repeatable and reproducible across the team, e.g. resetting a database to a clean slate when needed.

Unfortunately, such option is still missing in Vagrant directly. See GitHub for the feature request: https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/5355.

Fortunately, it's easy to work around this limitation via the Vagrantfile. It's just Ruby after all.

if ARGV.include? '--provision-with'
  config.vm.provision 'db-reset', type: 'shell', inline: 'mysql ...'
end

Answer 2

Vagrant now allows you to pass in run: "never" for an option provisioner. You can still run the provisioning manually with vagrant provision --provision-with <name> or by passing in the --provision --provision-with <name> flags.

So for this config, you would run vagrant provision --provision-with otherScript:

config.vm.provision "otherScript", type: "shell", run: "never" do |s|
    s.privileged = false
    s.inline = "bash /path/to/my/other/script.sh"
end

NOTE: You have to manually specify a name for the provisioner, you cannot just rely on the default name given if you don't specify a type. For instance, vagrant provision --provision-with shell will not work with this config:

config.vm.provision "shell", run: "never" do |s|
    s.privileged = false
    s.inline = "bash script.sh"
end