Anyone get vagrant ssh -c "echo hello" working for Windows guests?

[Andrew Pennebaker]

Hello,

I would like to setup a Windows Vagrant box as a build bot for managing cross-platform application builds. The idea is to leverage Vagrant to compile systems programming language apps for C, C++, Rust, and the like, against a Windows target, regardless of which operating system the developer is using as host.

I've gotten pretty far with this, setting up a Windows Vagrant box that can do most of the critical Vagrant things, like running downstream user file and shell provisioning in their Vagrantfile's, and vagrant rsync source code into the guest. `vagrant ssh` successfully launches a Command Prompt session that runs commands entered in over an interactive tty.

Packer source:

https://github.com/mcandre/packer-templates/tree/8ec39984f5834ce8b8ebacdfcd63de0438154cc0/windows

It's awesome that `vagrant ssh` works for interactive typing, however I want to be able to send commands over `vagrant ssh -c <command>`, in order to automate the application build steps. When I do this with other boxes like Debian, MINIX, FreeBSD, and so on, then it works great as a CLI-driven workflow! Unfortunately, `vagrant ssh -c "echo hello"` does not appear to work out of the box (pun intended) for Windows guests. Instead of outputting "hello", this prints a bunch of blank lines and then hangs indefinitely. If I add a --no-tty flag, the output complains of a missing bash program.

I can imagine a number of workarounds, like setting up bash.exe (either from bash on Ubuntu on Windows, or Git Bash, or cygwin, or whatever). Or using `vagrant powershell` instead of `vagrant ssh`. But that would defeat the purpose of a cross-compilation VM, as this would require the host to also be Windows.

Does anyone know of a Vagrantfile or packer configuration to fix `vagrant ssh -c ...` for Windows guests? Or should I look into forking and patching Vagrant itself? It's silly that `vagrant ssh` launches a working Command Prompt session, but `vagrant ssh -c` fails (and defaults to bash!)

[Alvaro Miranda Aguilera]

hi

$ vagrant ssh -c "echo hello"

echo hello                                                                                                                      

Connection to 127.0.0.1 closed.

$ cat Vagrantfile 

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|

  config.vm.box = "mcandre/windows"

  config.ssh.shell = "powershell.exe"

end

alvaro.

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Alvaro

[Andrew Pennebaker]

Alvaro, thanks for the update! I can confirm that vagrant ssh -c is able to execute Windows shell commands when Vagrantfile is configured with config.vm.ssh.shell = "powershell.exe".

Can we update the documentation now that config.vm.ssh.shell actually does affect vagrant ssh?

https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/vagrantfile/ssh_settings.html

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Cheers,

Andrew

[Andrew Pennebaker]

On second thought, Alvaro. It appears that this does NOT work!

Look more closely at the trace you posted. Is "hello" being output, or "echo hello"? In fact, whatever you specify for the command to vagrant ssh --no-tty -c <command>, the command string is simply reported to stdout without actually executing anything. This is a problem.

So I take back what I said about updating the documentation, as the documentation is unfortunately accurate: config.vm.ssh.shell does NOT alter the shell invoked by vagrant ssh. Stupid, but true.

I am working around this limitation by having packer install Git Bash, and sending commands over cygwin into my Windows box. I also submitted a PR to try to fix the hardcoded shell for Windows boxes, but my Ruby code seems to be off at the moment.

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Cheers,

Andrew