First things first in this post I’m using a lot of informations from my previous post about restarting services after mounting with help of udev events

A problem.

If you google for vagrant nfs rights or something similar you’ll find a ton of posts about problems with editing/writing files in vagrant guest OS.

I had similar problems while installing karma runner from npm. One of the dependencies is bufferutil which has to be compiled with help of node-gyp.

node-gyp is using a Makefile in which there is a copy command with “preserve rights” flag. And that cp -a is failing when uid of vagrant user is different then uid of files/directories mounted over NFS. And by default the uid/gid of files in vagrant are mapped from your local machine.

Under the hood.

I’m using debian as guest os in vagrant and the uid/gid for created vagrant user is 1000 (you can check this with simple id command after vagrant ssh). On my desktop I’m running OSX and the uid/gid is quite different:

→ id
uid=501(afterdesign) gid=20(staff) groups=20(staff),12(everyone) ...

So with help of udev events I’ve extended bash script to change UID and GID of vagrant user. We can do this simply with using usermod and getting the user UID/GID over NFS.

To get GID/UID I’m using simple stat commands. The only prerequisit here is that NFS is mounted (and it has to be to run some kind of provisioning) and there is Vagrantfile:

stat -c '%u' /project/Vagrantfile
stat -c '%g' /project/Vagrantfile

With that we can go full mental and use that usermod:

usermod -u $(stat -c '%u' /project/Vagrantfile) vagrant
usermod -g $(stat -c '%g' /project/Vagrantfile) vagrant

There might be a problem with systemd process when you try to use usermod so there is always a good idea to kill systemd process for vagrant user and then restart systemd-user-sessions service.

So in the end I’ve created the script:

if [[ ! -d /home/vagrant ]]; then
    exit 0;
fi

if [[ ! -a /project/Vagrantfile ]]; then
    exit 0;
fi

pkill -u vagrant -9 systemd

if [[ $(stat -c '%u' /project/Vagrantfile) != $(stat -c '%u' /home/vagrant) ]]; then
    usermod -u $(stat -c '%u' /project/Vagrantfile) vagrant
fi

if [[ $(stat -c '%g' /project/Vagrantfile) != $(stat -c '%g' /home/vagrant) ]]; then
    usermod -g $(stat -c '%g' /project/Vagrantfile) vagrant
fi

systemctl restart systemd-user-sessions.service

It has few conditions. Some of them are for the process of the box creation, some to make sure it’s not going to fail with nasty exit code and some are just to make changes once not every vagrant reload/halt/up