vagrant-hostmanager is a Vagrant 1.1+ plugin that manages the /etc/hosts file on guest machines. Its goal is to enable resolution of multi-machine environments deployed with a cloud provider where IP addresses are not known in advance.

The current implementation is a proof-of-concept supporting the larger objective of using Vagrant as a cloud management interface for development and production environments.

The plugin has been tested with Vagrant 1.1.5.

Install the plugin following the typical Vagrant 1.1 procedure:

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostmanager

The plugin hooks into the vagrant up and vagrant destroy commands automatically. When a machine is created or destroyed, all active machines with the same provider will have their /etc/hosts file updated accordingly. Auto update may be disabled by setting the config.hostmanager.auto_update attribute to false in the Vagrantfile.

To update the /etc/hosts file on each active machine manually, run the following command:

$ vagrant hostmanager

A machine's IP address is defined by either the static IP for a private network configuration or by the SSH host configuration. To disable using the private network IP address, set config.hostmanger.ignore_private_ip to true.

A machine's host name is defined by config.vm.hostname. If this is not set, it falls back to the symbol defining the machine in the Vagrantfile.

In addition, the hostmanager.aliases configuration attribute can be used to provide aliases for your host names.

Example configuration:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.hostmanager.auto_update = true
  config.hostmanager.ignore_private_ip = false
  config.vm.define "example-box" do |node|
    node.vm.hostname = "example-box-hostname"
    node.vm.network :private_network, ip: "192.168.42.42"
    node.hostmanager.aliases = %w(example-box.localdomain example-box-alias)
  end
end

Contributions are welcome.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request