vagrant-useradd

vagrant-useradd is a Vagrant plugin that lets you inject arbitrary Unix users and groups into a Vagrant base box.

Why? Race conditions, mostly. I feel Vagrant boxes should just contain your environment and versionable configuration, not your actual application, data and state. So you should be able to completely blow out a Vagrant box, reload it, reprovision it, and be back to a steady-state.

I've accomplished this in the past by mounting key data directories like Apache docroots and MySQL data directories outside of the box, so they don't fill up virtual disks and survive a rebuild . . . but that requires quite a bit of juggling, convincing core services to run as the user "vagrant" and various other equally terrible things.

However, if you could mount a data directory as Apache or MySQL most of these problems would conveniently disappear, but vboxfs mounts don't work if the guest doesn't already have the user or group present. So we need some way to forcibly inject users and groups before mounting. Thus, this module.

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-useradd

• Clone the repo.
• Build it

$ rake build

• Install the gem as a vagrant plugin

$ vagrant plugin install pkg/vagrant-useradd*.gem

vagrant-useradd has two options for how you can define your userlist.

If you just need the default group matching the user's name, you can do:

config.useradd.users = ['apache','mysql']

If you need to define extra groups (like, Apache's 'www-data' group on Debian-based distros), you can build a hash:

config.useradd.users = {
  'apache' => ['www-data'],
  'mysql' => nil,
  'somebody-else' => ['one','or-more','groups']
}

Note that extra groups are being added destructively. So if a provisioning run happens and modifies one of these users, when you reload it's going to be forcibly reset to what you've specified.

Want to see this plugin actually being used? I'm using it in my personal Vagrant config in my other public repo "lamp-vagrant-maths". Here's a link straight to where I set up the user array. Since the module injects users into the box I'm able to mount as specific users further down in the file.

1. Fork it
2. Hack on a branch
3. Send a Pull Request