How do I associate a Vagrant project directory with an existing VirtualBox VM?

Somehow my Vagrant project has disassociated itself from its VirtualBox VM, so that when I vagrant up Vagrant will import the base-box and create a new virtual machine.

Is there a way to re-associate the Vagrant project with the existing VM? How does Vagrant internally associate a Vagrantfile with a VirtualBox VM directory?

For Vagrant 1.6.3 do the following:

1) In the directory where your Vagrantfile is located, run the command

VBoxManage list vms

You will have something like this:

"virtualMachine" {xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}

2) Go to the following path:

cd .vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox

3) Create a file called id with the ID of your VM xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

4) Save the file and run vagrant up

WARNING: The solution below works for Vagrant 1.0.x but not Vagrant 1.1+.

Vagrant uses the ".vagrant" file in the same directory as your "Vagrantfile" to track the UUID of your VM. This file will not exist if a VM does not exist. The format of the file is JSON. It looks like this if a single VM exists:

{
   "active":{
      "default":"02f8b71c-75c6-4f33-a161-0f46a0665ab6"
   }
}

default is the name of the default virtual machine (if you're not using multi-VM setups).

If your VM has somehow become disassociated, what you can do is do VBoxManage list vms which will list every VM that VirtualBox knows about by its name and UUID. Then manually create a .vagrant file in the same directory as your Vagrantfile and fill in the contents properly.

Run vagrant status to ensure that Vagrant picked up the proper changes.

Note: This is not officially supported by Vagrant and Vagrant may change the format of .vagrant at any time. But this is valid as of Vagrant 0.9.7 and will be valid for Vagrant 1.0.

The solution with upper version is quite the same.

But first you need to launch the .vbox file by hand so that it appear in VBoxManage list vms

Then you can check the .vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/id to check that the uuid is the right one.

Had the issue today, my .vagrant folder was missing and found that there was a few more steps than simply setting the id:

1. Set the id:

   VBoxManage list vms
   

   Find the id and set in {project-folder}/.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/id.

   Note that default may be different if set in your Vagrantfile e.g. config.vm.define "someothername".

2. Stop the machine from provisioning:

   Create a file named action_provision in the same dir as the id file, set it's contents to: 1.5:{id} replacing {id} with the id found in step 1.

3. Setup a new public/private key:

   Vagrant uses a private key stored in .vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key to ssh into the machine. You'll need to generate a new one.

   ssh-keygen -t rsa
   

   name it private_key.

   vagrant ssh then copy the private_key.pub into /home/vagrant/.ssh/authorized_keys.