Re-Associating Vagrant to your VM

- 1 min
devops vagrant virtual-machine

If you notice that vagrant is no longer connecting to your box, or vagrant is trying to create a new box and telling you that a box with the same name already exists you can check to make sure that your existing vagrant box gets re-associated. (I’m using vagrant version 1.8.1)

  1. Find your box’s ID by running vboxmanage list vms in your terminal.

    This should return something along the lines of:

    "box1" {########-####-####-####-############}
"box2" {########-####-####-####-############}

  2. With the vagrant ID, go to .vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox within your project directory and find the file id. If there is no such file, you will have to create it.

  3. Paste the ID so it is the first and only line in the file. (Do NOT include the brackets)

  4. Save the file and you should be able to run vagrant up just fine.

Note: If your .vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox directory is empty, or is missing the private_key file, you will need to destroy and remake the box (unless you have a backup of the private key)`

Credits to this StackOverflow thread and this article (outdated)

Eric Su

Eric Su

MBA and software engineer building products for high-growth teams.