Recently, the ‘vagrant’ user somehow disappeared on a vagrant VM of mine. It may have happened during a do-dist-upgrade. It took me a while to figure out why vagrant provision and vagrant ssh were failing. Luckily, I had another sudo capable user on the VM that I could log in with to find the problem and resolve it. If I didn’t, I would probably have had to destroy the VM and recreate it.
Vagrant stores the private ssh key at a path like .vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key. It only puts the public key on the vm, so if the user is deleted, it’s gone. I generated a new one like:
ssh-keygen -t rsa -C 'me@tobymackenzie.com' -f .vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key
I then logged into the VM with my remaining user to recreate the vagrant user:
sudo useradd -m -s /bin/bash vagrant
gave them passwordless sudo capabilities:
sudo adduser vagrant sudo
sudo sh -c 'echo "vagrant ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL" >> /etc/sudoers'
and installed the new public into authorized_keys:
sudo mkdir /home/vagrant/.ssh
sudo vi /home/vagrant/.ssh/authorized_keys
# paste in key, `:wq`
sudo chmod -R go-rwx /home/vagrant/.ssh
sudo chown -R vagrant:vagrant /home/vagrant/.ssh
With that, I was once again able to vagrant ssh and vagrant provision to my hearts content.