So I am having some issues with vagrant. I had initially tried to report this as an issue on the vagrant github issue boards, but they kept closing the issues without responding to them. I guess they decided I wasn't worth their time, or they were just behaving unprofessionally. Anyway, Here is the problem: I use vagrant with virtualbox, and a new version of virtualbox was recently released that is, unfortunately, not compatible with the latest vagrant installation.
However, the people at hashicorp have already updated the source code so that it is compatible with the new version of virtualbox, but you have to build the vagrant executable from the source repo (instructions here). So I followed the instructions and vagrant is working just like it used to.....when the only command I need to run is vagrant up. I should also mention ahead of time that, in order to run the vagrant dev build, the current working directory needs to be the root of the source code repo and the dev build can only be run using the following command with ruby:
bundle exec vagrant
With that being said, I needed to update one of my custom boxes, so I built a vm in the updated version of virtualbox and ran the below command
bundle exec vagrant package --base go --vagrantfile ../../vagrant/vagrantfile
After an extended period of time, vagrant spat back out the following error
The executable 'bsdtar' Vagrant is trying to run was not found in the %PATH% variable. This is an `error. Please verify this software is installed and on the path.`
I should also note that I use a windows machine and that this error never occurred when using the installed version of vagrant. At this point, I had posted the issue on github to get some input from the devs, but they (very unprofessionally) decided to ignore my requests for help and close the issues without providing any response. I used the GNUwin32 project to make numerous unix commands available to my Windows environment and added the folder to my PATH environment variable. I then run the same command again to create my new box and it works!! So then I upload it to the vagrant cloud and attempt to update the vagrant box that is stored on my system by running the following command:
bundle exec vagrant box update
Then, after waiting for a while, vagrant then spat this error out at me:
The box failed to unpackage properly. Please verify that the box
file you're trying to add is not corrupted and that enough disk space
is available and then try again.
The output from attempting to unpackage (if any):
C:\gnuwin32\bin/bsdtar.EXE: invalid option -- s
Usage:
List: bsdtar.EXE -tf <archive-filename>
Extract: bsdtar.EXE -xf <archive-filename>
Create: bsdtar.EXE -cf <archive-filename> [filenames...]
Help: bsdtar.EXE --help
Another error, and still involving this bsdtar tool. It does not appear that anyone else is reporting the issue I am running into because I think they are just waiting for hashicorp to release the new official installation, but, just to give you a look into their priorities, the version of virtualbox that was released which no longer worked with vagrant was released back on December 10. It has been over a month since and there is still no updated release.
So, I am hoping that someone out there might be able to find out why I keep running into these errors when trying to use vagrant's dev build and provide a solution. If not, then maybe if someone else is able to reproduce the issue and report it to hashicorp, maybe they will listen to someone else.
I figured it out. My original hypothesis was correct: since vagrant is a tool that was built primarily to be run on linux machines, then vagrant runs in windows, the installation includes a mingw environment with all of the dependencies vagrant needs to function and which the installed vagrant executable imports into the console session when run. This why the dev build kept failing: because it was not importing this mingw environment. So, in order to fix the issue, I first cloned the vagrant source code repo from github and followed the instructions I linked to above to build the executable from the source repo. I then copied all of the files in the source repo into the following folder:
<hashicorp install folder root>\Vagrant\embedded\gems\2.2.6\gems\vagrant-<version num>
So, for me, the destination directory is C:\HashiCorp\Vagrant\embedded\gems\2.2.6\gems\vagrant-2.2.6
This directory is identical to the source code repo, and copying the source code repo to the above folder replaces the installation version of vagrant with the dev build. After I did this, running the vagrant commands which had failed previously normally (as in, without using ruby or bundle) worked. I hope this helps someone else out there who Hashicorp has decided is not worth their time.