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Private Networks - Networking	networking-private

Private Networks

Network identifier: private_network

Private networks allow you to access your guest machine by some address that is not publicly accessible from the global internet. In general, this means your machine gets an address in the private address space.

Multiple machines within the same private network (also usually with the restriction that they're backed by the same provider) can communicate with each other on private networks.

Guest operating system support. Private networks generally require configuring the network adapters on the guest machine. This process varies from OS to OS. Vagrant ships with knowledge of how to configure networks on a variety of guest operating systems, but it is possible if you're using a particularly old or new operating system that private networks won't properly configure.

DHCP

The easiest way to use a private network is to allow the IP to be assigned via DHCP.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.network "private_network", type: "dhcp"
end

This will automatically assign an IP address from the reserved address space. The IP address can be determined by using vagrant ssh to SSH into the machine and using the appropriate command line tool to find the IP, such as ifconfig.

Static IP

You can also specify a static IP address for the machine. This lets you access the Vagrant managed machine using a static, known IP. The Vagrantfile for a static IP looks like this:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.50.4"
end

It is up to the users to make sure that the static IP doesn't collide with any other machines on the same network.

While you can choose any IP you'd like, you should use an IP from the reserved private address space. These IPs are guaranteed to never be publicly routable, and most routers actually block traffic from going to them from the outside world.

Disable Auto-Configuration

If you want to manually configure the network interface yourself, you can disable Vagrant's auto-configure feature by specifying auto_config:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.50.4",
    auto_config: false
end

VirtualBox Internal Network

The VirtualBox provider supports using the private network as a VirtualBox internal network. By default, private networks are host-only networks, because those are the easiest to work with. However, internal networks can be enabled as well.

To specify a private network as an internal network for VirtualBox use the virtualbox__intnet option with the network. The virtualbox__ (double underscore) prefix tells Vagrant that this option is only for the VirtualBox provider.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.50.4",
    virtualbox__intnet: true
end

Additionally, if you want to specify that the VirtualBox provider join a specific internal network, specify the name of the internal network:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.50.4",
    virtualbox__intnet: "mynetwork"
end

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