Does Vagrant work with Windows boxes?

[Jay Perry]

Hi,

I wondering if it's possible to create a windows vagrant box and have vagrant manage it?  How does the ssh option work?  Will the provisioning with chef work?

Thanks,

Jay

[Mitchell Hashimoto]

Jay,

There are currently no working Windows boxes as far as I know. There
are technical difficulties in order to get this going:

* There needs to be a Windows guest written:
http://vagrantup.com/docs/guests.html Some people in the community
have started doing this but I haven't seen any big pull requests yet
:)
* SSH isn't the best thing for Windows, so perhaps WinRM or something
would be more natural. I've abstracted out "communication" systems, so
that could be written as well:
https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/tree/master/lib/vagrant/communication
* Provisioning is really up to whether Chef/Puppet works properly on
Windows, but once WinRM/SSH works, then Vagrant is kind of out of the
picture.

Best,
Mitchell

> Thanks,
> Jay

[Thomas Soares]

> I wondering if it's possible to create a windows vagrant box and have
> vagrant manage it?  How does the ssh option work?  Will the provisioning
> with chef work?
>

We're experimenting with this now. The (admittedly kludgey) method
that we're using is to make the Windows box look like a Linux box
using Cygwin. We've had a reasonable amount of success for at least
the basic operations of startup, SSH, and file sharing between guest
and host (sort of--still working some issues to see whether we can get
this automatically setup). We had to create a few small scripts to
work around the sudo command and to get shutdown to work properly--all
of which could be better handled by creating a proper Windows guest
for Vagrant. We haven't done anything with Puppet yet other than set
it up, but it seems plausible that it would work properly through
Vagrant--probably the same for Chef.

So I think the answer to the question is, "sort of". I think it will
be good enough for our team to share a Windows-based VM, but a *nix
guest will probably give you much better results.

[stoked]

Thomas,

Care to share how you managed to get ssh commands to work? I've been able to build a box via veewee and vagrant up it, but ssh commands never seem to execute. Whenever I issue the commands directly via ssh into the windows box, they work perfectly.