Vagrant chicken-and-egg: Shared folder with uid = apache user

Question

My Vagrant box is build from a base linux (scientific linux), during provisioning (using shell scripts), Apache is installed.

I recently changed the Vagrant file (v2) to:

config.vm.synced_folder "public", "/var/www/sites.d/example.com",    :owner => "apache", :group => "apache" 

Which works well if the box is already provisioned and just rebooted.

Now, after a vagrant destroy && vagrant up I get the error:

mount -t vboxsf -o uid=`id -u apache`,gid=`id -g apache`     /var/www/sites.d/example.com /var/www/sites.d/example.com id: apache: User does not exist 

Which is clear - as during the initial run, apache is not yet installed.

An ugly workaround would of course be to do the basic provisioning with that synced_folder commented out, comment it in and then reboot.

Is there any clean trick to solve that? Especially in a way that vagrant up always runs without interruptions, even if the box is new.

Answer 1

If you can fix the uid/gid values you can use these in the mount command - they don't have to relate to an existing user/group

I do this with a user that is later created by puppet using fixed (matching)uid / gid values

config.vm.synced_folder "foo", "/var/www/foo",    id: "foo", :mount_options => ["uid=510,gid=510"] 

Answer 2

This is what I did:

config.vm.synced_folder "./MyApp", "/opt/MyApp", owner: 10002, group: 1007, create: true  config.vm.provision :shell do |shell|   shell.inline = "groupadd -g 1007 myapp;                   useradd -c 'MyApp User' -d /opt/MyApp -g myapp -m -u 10002 myapp;" end 

Instead of use the user name and group (as a text) use the uid and gid. Then create the group and user with those ids. This is because the error in fact is:

mount -t vboxsf -o uid=`id -u myapp`,gid=`getent group myapp | cut -d: -f3` opt_MyApp /opt/MyApp ... id: myapp: No such user 

The id command was not able to recognize the user. So, switching to uid and gid the command id won't be used by vagrant.

The only warning I got with this approach is that user home directory (/opt/MyApp) already exist, but I can live with that, or you can change the useradd command to ignore the home directory if already exists.

Before that, the workaround I used is:

vagrant up; vagrant provision; vagrant reload 

But, it not nice neither clean.