Help! Vagrant keeps recreating my machine

We use Vagrant for development and sometimes on some OSX systems it decides that it must create a new virtual machine when there’s already one that is working perfectly! This is annoying as provisioning the new machine takes time. If you got here I assume you’re using VirtualBox like me.

Step 1: Please don’t reprovision

Setting a fixed name in your Vagrantfile will stop the creation of a new box immediately.

vb.name = “carwow_devbox”

Step 2: Don’t push a new SSH key

Pushing a new key will render your machine inaccessible without some fiddling. To stop it from happening just add this to your Vagrantfile.

config.ssh.insert_key = false

Step 3: Run this simple bash command

It will reconnect your previously working machine to the vagrant box. Substitute carwow_devbox with the name you chose in Step 1. Run this command in your terminal:

$ VBoxManage list vms | grep carwow_devbox | sed ‘s/”carwow_devbox” {\(.*\)}/\1/’ > ~/vagrant/.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/id

Step 4: Delete erroneously created box

Open VirtualBox and delete the newly created un–provisioned box.

Hope this article can help someone!

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