Pre-populate vagrant synced folder contents

Solution 1:

Vagrant's built-in provisioning features should be a perfect fit for this. There are a whole bunch of ways you could do it, but the simplest is probably to take the guts of your Upstart script and make them a plain shell script. Then, put one of these blocks in your Vagrantfile:

1. Using an "inline" script. Vagrant will copy the contents from the Vagrantfile into a script in the /tmp directory and execute it.

   $script = <<<SCRIPT
   // The contents of your script go here
   SCRIPT
   
   config.vm.provision "shell", inline: $script
   

   Note that the script here is inside a "heredoc", which means that you need to be careful to make sure that the SCRIPT token which ends the heredoc is in the right place - i.e. on a line by itself, without extra whitespace. (The link about heredoc above does show a way to allow whitespace, but you need to be careful anyway.)

2. Pointing to a script file. Vagrant will copy this file into the /tmp directory and execute it.

   config.vm.provision "shell", path: "setup.sh"
   

   Note that the path here is relative to the Vagrantfile location. However, the file is not executed from that location, so if you need the file to be in a certain directory, you should follow method #3.

3. Using an "inline" script that points to a script file. This way, you can execute a script in a chosen location (in the example below, that's in /vagrant after you have done prerequisites like chmod or setting environment variables.

   $script = <<SCRIPT
   chmod +x /vagrant/setup.sh
   cd /vagrant
   ./setup.sh
   SCRIPT
   
   config.vm.provision "shell", inline: $script
   

You could also use a provisioning method that works through a "real" deployment and provisioning system, but depending on your requirements that may be overkill.