Update March 10th, 2014: After spending an extra five minutes this morning trying to ssh in with my the virtual machine IP, instead of using my local IP with the forwarded port, I was able to get it work. I don’t know why this hasn’t worked for me in the past unless I’ve just been typing the wrong IP or something. In retrospect, assuming the VM IP was 192.168.56.101, I may have just inadvertently been using 192.168.1.101. So, from now on, I’ll be using the VM IP for ssh but I won’t go as far as to say that it’s wrong to use your local IP and forwarded ports. If you want to ssh in to multiple vagrant boxes on the same IP, local or otherwise, port forwarding makes that possible and PuPHPet makes it really easy to set up.
Regarding the ‘vagrant ssh’ command in Windows, I’m not sure if it will work. By default, if you run vagrant ssh from your vagrant dir in the Windows shell you get this:
C:Usersgpspa_000DevelopmentUTHSCMultisiteVagrant>vagrant ssh `ssh` executable not found in any directories in the %PATH% variable. Is an SSH client installed? Try installing Cygwin, MinGW or Git, all of which contain an SSH client. Or use the PuTTY SSH client with the following authentication information shown below:
Host: 127.0.0.1 Port: 2222 Username: vagrant Private key: C:/Users/gpspa_000/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key
I may come back and try installing one of those suggested ssh clients and setting up my keys later to see if it works. Even if it does, I’m not sure I’d be able to use ‘vagrant ssh’ for multiple boxes since it’s connecting to the local IP on 2222. I’m in no big hurry here since I prefer to use PuTTY.
Update April 9th, 2014: Since I wrote this, I’ve been able to use vagrant ssh in Windows using the Bash shell that comes with Git. If you’re having trouble with anything, try a different shell. Boo the default Windows CMD line shell.
I’m partly writing this so that someone will come along and tell me that my workflow sucks and I’m doing everything wrong; that is the some of the best advice after all. There’s also the possibility that this is extra basic and I’m just too much of a noob to realize it. If, by some chance, this helps someone, awesome.
First PuPHPet is the best thing ever so if you aren’t familiar with it check it out. I’ll assume you know what it is and jump right in here. I use Windows (Locally). Don’t hate; it is what it is.
PuPHPet makes SSHing in to your VM with PuTTY really easy. Once you’ve run ‘vagrant up’ All you need to do is connect to 127.0.0.1 on port 2222 and login with ‘vagrant’ as the username and password. The problem is that if you want to SSH in to multiple Vagrant VM’s running simultaneously for whatever reason, you’re going to have a bad time since you only have one local IP. Or so I thought.
PuPHPet actually generates a random host port in the ‘Local VM Forwarded Ports’ section that you can use as the port in PuTTY. If you need to check the port, you can go to your network settings in VirtualBox and click on Port Forwarding.
If I’m working on two separate projects and I want to keep simultaneous sessions open for both of them, all I need to do is change the port in PuTTY to the forwarded port in VirtualBox and viola. If you’ve only got one box up you can use 2222 but you might as well use the forwarded in case you need to add one later on.
Note: I’ve gotten in to the habit of dropping my yaml file from an existing box in to PuPHPet and just changing the Apache stuff to make new boxes. There’s nothing wrong with this; my configuration is pretty much the same from project to project so there’s no point in filling the whole thing out again.
However, that forwarded port is randomly generated so make sure to change it if your configurating a new box from an old yaml file or you’ll run in to a conflict. I just make sure to copy it before I drop the yaml file.
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