This is a Vagrant 1.2+ plugin that adds an AWS provider to Vagrant, allowing Vagrant to control and provision machines in EC2 and VPC.

NOTE: This plugin requires Vagrant 1.2+,

• Boot EC2 or VPC instances.
• SSH into the instances.
• Provision the instances with any built-in Vagrant provisioner.
• Minimal synced folder support via rsync.
• Define region-specifc configurations so Vagrant can manage machines in multiple regions.

Install using standard Vagrant 1.1+ plugin installation methods. After installing, vagrant up and specify the aws provider. An example is shown below.

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-aws
...
$ vagrant up --provider=aws
...

Of course prior to doing this, you'll need to obtain an AWS-compatible box file for Vagrant.

After installing the plugin (instructions above), the quickest way to get started is to actually use a dummy AWS box and specify all the details manually within a config.vm.provider block. So first, add the dummy box using any name you want:

$ vagrant box add dummy https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws/raw/master/dummy.box
...

And then make a Vagrantfile that looks like the following, filling in your information where necessary.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "dummy"

  config.vm.provider :aws do |aws, override|
    aws.access_key_id = "YOUR KEY"
    aws.secret_access_key = "YOUR SECRET KEY"
    aws.keypair_name = "KEYPAIR NAME"

    aws.ami = "ami-7747d01e"

    override.ssh.username = "ubuntu"
    override.ssh.private_key_path = "PATH TO YOUR PRIVATE KEY"
  end
end

And then run vagrant up --provider=aws.

This will start an Ubuntu 12.04 instance in the us-east-1 region within your account. And assuming your SSH information was filled in properly within your Vagrantfile, SSH and provisioning will work as well.

Note that normally a lot of this boilerplate is encoded within the box file, but the box file used for the quick start, the "dummy" box, has no preconfigured defaults.

If you have issues with SSH connecting, make sure that the instances are being launched with a security group that allows SSH access.

Every provider in Vagrant must introduce a custom box format. This provider introduces aws boxes. You can view an example box in the example_box/ directory. That directory also contains instructions on how to build a box.

The box format is basically just the required metadata.json file along with a Vagrantfile that does default settings for the provider-specific configuration for this provider.

This provider exposes quite a few provider-specific configuration options:

• access_key_id - The access key for accessing AWS
• ami - The AMI id to boot, such as "ami-12345678"
• availability_zone - The availability zone within the region to launch the instance. If nil, it will use the default set by Amazon.
• instance_ready_timeout - The number of seconds to wait for the instance to become "ready" in AWS. Defaults to 120 seconds.
• instance_type - The type of instance, such as "m1.small". The default value of this if not specified is "m1.small".
• keypair_name - The name of the keypair to use to bootstrap AMIs which support it.
• private_ip_address - The private IP address to assign to an instance within a VPC
• region - The region to start the instance in, such as "us-east-1"
• secret_access_key - The secret access key for accessing AWS
• security_groups - An array of security groups for the instance. If this instance will be launched in VPC, this must be a list of security group IDs.
• iam_instance_profile_arn - The Amazon resource name (ARN) of the IAM Instance Profile to associate with the instance
• iam_instance_profile_name - The name of the IAM Instance Profile to associate with the instance
• subnet_id - The subnet to boot the instance into, for VPC.
• tags - A hash of tags to set on the machine.
• use_iam_profile - If true, will use IAM profiles for credentials.

These can be set like typical provider-specific configuration:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  # ... other stuff

  config.vm.provider :aws do |aws|
    aws.access_key_id = "foo"
    aws.secret_access_key = "bar"
  end
end

In addition to the above top-level configs, you can use the region_config method to specify region-specific overrides within your Vagrantfile. Note that the top-level region config must always be specified to choose which region you want to actually use, however. This looks like this:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  # ... other stuff

  config.vm.provider :aws do |aws|
    aws.access_key_id = "foo"
    aws.secret_access_key = "bar"
    aws.region = "us-east-1"

    # Simple region config
    aws.region_config "us-east-1", :ami => "ami-12345678"

    # More comprehensive region config
    aws.region_config "us-west-2" do |region|
      region.ami = "ami-87654321"
      region.keypair_name = "company-west"
    end
  end
end

The region-specific configurations will override the top-level configurations when that region is used. They otherwise inherit the top-level configurations, as you would probably expect.

Networking features in the form of config.vm.network are not supported with vagrant-aws, currently. If any of these are specified, Vagrant will emit a warning, but will otherwise boot the AWS machine.

There is minimal support for synced folders. Upon vagrant up, vagrant reload, and vagrant provision, the AWS provider will use rsync (if available) to uni-directionally sync the folder to the remote machine over SSH.

This is good enough for all built-in Vagrant provisioners (shell, chef, and puppet) to work!

To use tags, simply define a hash of key/value for the tags you want to associate to your instance, like:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  # ... other stuff

  config.vm.provider "aws" do |aws|
    aws.tags = {
	  'Name' => 'Some Name',
	  'Some Key' => 'Some Value'
    }
  end
end

You can specify user data for the instance being booted.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  # ... other stuff

  config.vm.provider "aws" do |aws|
    # Option 1: a single string
    aws.user_data = "#!/bin/bash\necho 'got user data' > /tmp/user_data.log\necho"

    # Option 2: use a file
    aws.user_data = File.read("user_data.txt")
  end
end

To work on the vagrant-aws plugin, clone this repository out, and use Bundler to get the dependencies:

$ bundle

Once you have the dependencies, verify the unit tests pass with rake:

$ bundle exec rake

If those pass, you're ready to start developing the plugin. You can test the plugin without installing it into your Vagrant environment by just creating a Vagrantfile in the top level of this directory (it is gitignored) and add the following line to your Vagrantfile

Vagrant.require_plugin "vagrant-aws"

Use bundler to execute Vagrant:

$ bundle exec vagrant up --provider=aws