Tag: vagrant

Using SSH agent forwarding with Vagrant

Sometimes you’ll want to use your local SSH keys on your Vagrant boxes, so that you don’t have to manage password-less keys for each box. This can be done with SSH agent forwarding, which is explained in great detail on Unixwiz.net.

Setting this up is fairly straightforward. On the host machine, you need to add the following to ~/.ssh/config (which you should create if it doesn’t exist):

host your.domain.com
    ForwardAgent yes

You need to replace your.domain.com with either the domain or the IP address of your Vagrant box. You can wildcard this with host *, but this is a really bad idea because it lets every server you SSH to access your keys.

Once you’ve done that, just run ssh-add to ensure you ensure your identities are added to the SSH agent.

Now, add the following to the config block in your Vagrantfile:

config.ssh.forward_agent = true

That’s all it takes. You can make sure it worked by comparing the output of ssh-add -L on both the host machine and the guest box.

When did dependency management get so complicated?

This evening I wanted to start hacking on a project of mine, which is a simple WordPress theme. My main development machine was being used by somebody else, so I decided to boot up my old Sony Vaio running Ubuntu. It’ll be simple, I thought. I’ve just got to clone the repo, run npm install, bower install, and grunt build, and I’ll be good to go. I was wrong.

First, the version of npm installed on the laptop is apparently so out-of-date that it can’t run the install. So I let it update itself (and all the other packages I have installed - why not?) with sudo npm -g update. Being a Sunday night, my broadband connection is running spectacularly slow, so the update process takes about 10 minutes at 40kB/s. But hey, at least now I can run npm install, right?

Nope. Now npm is throwing some errors with unhelpful messages, but that’s fine, I’ll just trawl through the error log. 5 minutes later, I figure out that ~/tmp belongs to root (probably from running npm update as root). OK, fine, I’ll change the permissions and try again. This time npm install works! But of course, my connection is so horribly slow and grunt has so many dependencies that the install process takes over 15 minutes.