vagrant/website/docs/source/v2/provisioning/basic_usage.html.md

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Basic Usage - Provisioning	provisioning-basic

Basic Usage of Provisioners

While Vagrant offers multiple options for how you are able to provision your machine, there is a standard usage pattern as well as some important points common to all provisioners that are important to know.

Configuration

First, every provisioner is configured within your Vagrantfile using the config.vm.provision method call. For example, the Vagrantfile below enables shell provisioning:

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

  config.vm.provision "shell", inline: "echo hello"
end

Every provisioner has an identifier, such as "shell", used as the first parameter to the provisioning configuration. Following that is basic key/value for configuring that specific provisioner. Instead of basic key/value, you can also use a Ruby block for a syntax that is more like variable assignment. The following is effectively the same as the prior example:

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

  config.vm.provision "shell" do |s|
    s.inline = "echo hello"
  end
end

The benefit of the block-based syntax is that with more than a couple options it can greatly improve readability. Additionally, some provisioners, like the Chef provisioner, have special methods that can be called within that block to ease configuration that can't be done with the key/value approach.

Multiple Provisioners

Multiple config.vm.provision methods can be used to define multiple provisioners. These provisioners will be run in the order they're defined. This is useful for a variety of reasons, but most commonly it is used so that a shell script can bootstrap some of the system so that another provisioner can take over later.

Running Provisioners

Provisioners are run in three cases: vagrant up, vagrant reload, and vagrant provision.

A --no-provision flag can be passed to up and reload if you don't want to run provisioners. Likewise, you can pass --provision to force provisioning.

The --provision-with flag can be used if you only want to run a specific provisioner if you have multiple provisioners specified. For example, if you have a shell and Puppet provisioner and only want to run the shell one, you can do vagrant provision --provision-with shell.