Windows 8.1: Vagrant could not detect VirtualBox! Make sure VirtualBox is properly installed

Question

This question is one that I will answer in the hope that anyone with the same problem will be able to fix the problem without too much head banging like I did!

I'd just installed VirtualBox (4.3.16) and Vagrant (1.3.5) as per the instructions on their site. All seemed pretty clear and easy until I got to the point of running the command: vagrant up

This immediately returned the error:

Vagrant could not detect VirtualBox! Make sure VirtualBox is properly installed.

Vagrant uses the `VBoxManage` binary that ships with VirtualBox, and requires
this to be available on the PATH. If VirtualBox is installed, please find the
`VBoxManage` binary and add it to the PATH environmental variable.

This is an amazing error message... Where am I supposed to find this PATH variable???

Answer 1

You need to run vagrant from an elevated prompt, i.e. cmd needs to be "Run as administrator".

Vagrant (or VBoxManage.exe, for that matter) does not need to be in your PATH environment variable. The Virtual Box installer automatically sets the VBOX_INSTALL_PATH or VBOX_MSI_INSTALL_PATH environment variable which is what Vagrant uses to look it up, but Vagrant cannot run it unless it's elevated.

Answer 2

I found a lot of suggestions on how to fix it but none of them helped until I finally found someone mention that VirtualBox had renamed a variable name, I was yet to find where so after some more digging, this is the solution that finally got things working:

Look for the following file (default install path on Windows 8.1):

C:\HashiCorp\Vagrant\embedded\gems\gems\vagrant-1.3.5\plugins\providers\virtualbox\driver\base.rb

Open this file in your favourite text editor and do a search and replace all instances of VBOX_INSTALL_PATH to VBOX_MSI_INSTALL_PATH

Hope this helps someone starting out with Vagrant and VirtualBox!

Answer 3

For Vagrant 1.6.5 and Virtual Box 4.3.18, I believe just restarting the computer after installing virtual box was the trick (I also reinstalled Vagrant)