vagrant-hostmanager is a Vagrant 1.1+ plugin that manages the /etc/hosts file on guest machines (and optionally the host). Its goal is to enable resolution of multi-machine environments deployed with a cloud provider where IP addresses are not known in advance.

NOTE: Version 1.1 of the plugin prematurely introduced a feature to hook into commands other than vagrant up and vagrant destroy. Version 1.1 broke support for some providers. Version 1.2 reverts this feature until a suitable implementation supporting all providers is available.

Potentially breaking change in v1.5.0: the running order on vagrant up has changed so that hostmanager runs before provisioning takes place. This ensures all hostnames are available to the guest when it is being provisioned (see #73). Previously, hostmanager would run as the very last action. If you depend on the old behavior, see the provisioner section.

Install the plugin following the typical Vagrant 1.1 procedure:

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostmanager

To update the /etc/hosts file on each active machine, run the following command:

$ vagrant hostmanager

The plugin hooks into the vagrant up and vagrant destroy commands automatically. When a machine enters or exits the running state , all active machines with the same provider will have their /etc/hosts file updated accordingly. Set the hostmanager.enabled attribute to true in the Vagrantfile to activate this behavior.

To update the host's /etc/hosts file, set the hostmanager.manage_host attribute to true.

A machine's IP address is defined by either the static IP for a private network configuration or by the SSH host configuration. To disable using the private network IP address, set config.hostmanger.ignore_private_ip to true.

A machine's host name is defined by config.vm.hostname. If this is not set, it falls back to the symbol defining the machine in the Vagrantfile.

If the hostmanager.include_offline attribute is set to true, boxes that are up or have a private ip configured will be added to the hosts file.

In addition, the hostmanager.aliases configuration attribute can be used to provide aliases for your host names.

Example configuration:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.hostmanager.enabled = true
  config.hostmanager.manage_host = true
  config.hostmanager.ignore_private_ip = false
  config.hostmanager.include_offline = true
  config.vm.define 'example-box' do |node|
    node.vm.hostname = 'example-box-hostname'
    node.vm.network :private_network, ip: '192.168.42.42'
    node.hostmanager.aliases = %w(example-box.localdomain example-box-alias)
  end
end

Starting at version 1.5.0, hostmanager runs before any provisioning occurs. If you would like hostmanager to run after or during your provisioning stage, you can use hostmanager as a provisioner. This allows you to use the provisioning order to ensure that hostmanager runs when desired. The provisioner will collect hosts from boxes with the same provider as the running box.

Example:

# Disable the default hostmanager behavior
config.hostmanager.enabled = false

# ... possible provisioner config before hostmanager ...

# hostmanager provisioner
config.vm.provision :hostmanager

# ... possible provisioning config after hostmanager ...

You can customize way, how host manager resolves IP address for each machine. This might be handy in case of aws provider, where host name is stored in ssh_info hash of each machine. This causes generation of invalid /etc/hosts file.

Custom IP resolver gives you oportunity to calculate IP address for each machine by yourself, giving You also access to the machine that is updating /etc/hosts. For example:

config.hostmanager.ip_resolver = proc do |vm, resolving_vm|
  if hostname = (vm.ssh_info && vm.ssh_info[:host])
    `host #{hostname}`.split("\n").last[/(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)/, 1]
  end
end

Add the following snippet to the sudoers file (for example, to /etc/sudoers.d/vagrant_hostmanager) to make it stop asking password when updating hosts file (replace /home/user with your actual home directory):

Cmnd_Alias VAGRANT_HOSTMANAGER_UPDATE = /bin/cp /home/user/.vagrant.d/tmp/hosts.local /etc/hosts
%sudo ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: VAGRANT_HOSTMANAGER_UPDATE

Hostmanager will detect Windows guests and hosts and use the appropriate path for the hosts file: %WINDIR%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

By default on a Windows host, the hosts file is not writable without elevated privileges. If hostmanager detects that it cannot overwrite the file, it will attempt to do so with elevated privileges, causing the UAC prompt to appear.

Due to limitations caused by UAC, cancelling out of the UAC prompt will not cause any visible errors, however the hosts file will not be updated.

If you want to install the bleeding version of vagrant-hostmanager (at your own risk), you can do the following (requires ruby and git):

git clone https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-hostmanager.git
cd vagrant-hostmanager
rake gem:build
vagrant plugin install pkg/vagrant-hostmanager-*.gem

Contributions are welcome.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request