Because the underlying technology Vagrant uses to create our development environment is the VM we can use the Secure Shell (or SSH) to administer our Unix based VMs. In this article, we’ll discuss how to use the built-in SSH tools of Vagrant.

Vagrant SSH-config

The first command is vagrant ssh-config. This will display the information about how we can use an SSH compatible client to connect to our VM.

our-awesome-project % vagrant ssh-config
Host default
  HostName 127.0.0.1
  User vagrant
  Port 2222
  UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
  StrictHostKeyChecking no
  PasswordAuthentication no
  IdentityFile /Users/scottkeck-warren/our-awesome-project/.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key
  IdentitiesOnly yes
  LogLevel FATAL

The things to highlight in this output are the user “vagrant”, the port (2222), and the location of the IdentityFile which are all necessary when we’re setting up an SSH connection.

Vagrant SSH

The next command of interest is the vagrant ssh command. If we have an SSH client installed in the path of our command prompt Vagrant will use it to connect to our guest VM automatically. If we don’t or it’s not compatible with Vagrant we can still manually connect.

our-awesome-project % vagrant ssh
Last login: Thu Feb  4 01:03:24 2021 from 10.0.2.2
vagrant@ubuntu2004:~$ 

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed how to use vagrant’s ssh-config command to get the connection information for an SSH client and how to use the built-in SSH command to connect to our vagrant development environment’s VM.