SSH into a Vagrant machine with Ansible

Question

Normally, you can ssh into a Vagrant-managed VM with vagrant ssh. There are two options:

1. You can use an insecure_private_key generated by Vagrant to authenticate.
2. Use your own private key - provided that config.ssh.forward_agent is set to true, and the VM is configured correctly

I use the second option. S when I run vagrant ssh, I ssh into the machine with my custom private key.

Now I need to let Ansible SSH into my Vagrant machine and I do not want to use Vagrantfile for it.

So I executed:

ansible-playbook -i hosts/development --private-key=~/.ssh/id_rsa -u vagrant dev.yml

And I have this error returned:

fatal: [192.168.50.5] => SSH Error: Permission denied (publickey). while connecting to 192.168.50.5:22

The hosts/inventory file holds just the IP of my Vagrant VM (192.168.50.5).

I do not know why Ansible cannot ssh into the VM. It's using exactly the same user (vagrant) and key (id_rsa) as when executing vagrant ssh.

However, there is no problem sshing with vagrant ssh while the above would not run.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

The problem probably lies within your hosts/inventory file. You need to add the proper connection configuration for Ansible therein, save and re-run.

192.168.50.5 ansible_ssh_port=22 ansible_ssh_user=vagrant ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/.ssh/id_rsa 

If you are not using port 22, adjust the ansible_ssh_port in your hosts file accordingly.

It is also a possibility that you have not setup your pubkey in Vagrant, hence this would also not work. To test this, run:

vagrant ssh-config | grep IdentityFile
# result should be your private key and not
#   .vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key

If you have not put your pubkey in the Vagrant vm, you will need to add that before you can try your private key.

Reference: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_inventory.html#list-of-behavioral-inventory-parameters

Reference: https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/cli/ssh_config.html