So, are you already using Vagrant to manage your VirtualBox VMs?

Then you probably have realized already how annoying is to keep the VBox guest additions up to date in your VMs.

Don’t worry, you can update them with just one command or automatically on each start using the Vagrant-vbguest plugin.

Installation

Requires vagrant 0.9.4 or later (including 1.0)

Since vagrant v1.0.0 the prefered installation method for vagrant is using the provided packages or installers.

Therefore if you installed Vagrant as a package (rpm, deb, dmg,…)

vagrant gem install vagrant-vbguest

Or if you installed vagrant using RubyGems (gem install vagrant):

gem install vagrant-vbguest

Usage

By default the plugin will check what version of the guest additions is installed in the VM every time it is started with vagrant start. Note that it won’t be checked when resuming a box.

In any case, it can be disabled in the Vagrantfile

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  # set auto_update to false, if do NOT want to check the correct additions
  # version when booting this machine
  config.vbguest.auto_update = false
end

If it detects an outdated version, it will automatically install the matching version from the VirtualBox installation, located at

• linux : /usr/share/virtualbox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso
• Mac : /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso
• Windows : %PROGRAMFILES%/Oracle/VirtualBox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso

The location can be overridden with the iso_path parameter in your Vagrantfile, and can point to a http server

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vbguest.iso_path = "#{ENV['HOME']}/Downloads/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso"
  # or
  config.vbguest.iso_path = "http://company.server/VirtualBox/$VBOX_VERSION/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso"
end

If you have disabled the automatic update, it still easy to manually update the VirtualBox Guest Additions version, just running from the command line

vagrant vbguest