An Update on Using Docker Machine with Vagrant

As part of a project on which I’m working, I’ve been spending some time working with Docker Machine and Vagrant over the last few days. You may recall that I first wrote about using these two tools together back in August 2015. As a result of spending some additional time with these tools—which I chose because I felt like they streamlined some work around this project—I’ve uncovered some additional information that I wanted to share with readers.

As a brief recap to the original article, I showed how you could use Vagrant to quickly and easily spin up a VM, then use Docker Machine’s generic driver to add it to Docker Machine, like this:

docker-machine create -d generic \
--generic-ssh-user vagrant \
--generic-ssh-key ~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key \
--generic-ip-address <IP address of VM> \
<name of VM>

This approach works fine if the Vagrant-created VM is reachable without port forwarding. What do I mean? In the past, the VMware provider for Vagrant used functionality in VMware Fusion or VMware Workstation to provide an RFC 1918-addressed network that had external access via network address translation (NAT). In Fusion, for example, this was the default “Share with my Mac” network. Thus, when you created a VM using Vagrant and the VMware provider for Vagrant, the first network interface card (NIC) in the VM would be assigned to this default NAT network and get an RFC 1918-style private IP address (on my Mac Pro, this network uses the 192.168.70.0/24 network range, but I don’t know if that’s the default for all systems). As a result, when you would run vagrant ssh-config for such a VM, you’d get something like this:

Host coreos-01
  HostName 192.168.70.132
  User core
  Port 22
  UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
  StrictHostKeyChecking no
  PasswordAuthentication no
  IdentityFile /Users/slowe/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key
  IdentitiesOnly yes
  LogLevel FATAL

With version 5 of the VMware provider for Vagrant (which is required in order to use the latest versions of Fusion and Workstation), this behavior seems to have changed, although it’s not clear if this is intentional or not (there’s an open GitHub issue about this change). Sometimes Vagrant will report connection information as shown above, but other times it will report using a forwarded port on the loopback address:

Host coreos-01
  HostName 127.0.0.1
  User core
  Port 2222
  UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
  StrictHostKeyChecking no
  PasswordAuthentication no
  IdentityFile /Users/slowe/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key
  IdentitiesOnly yes
  LogLevel FATAL

This occurs, by the way, even when an actual RFC 1918-style private IP address has, in fact, been assigned to the VM and is functioning normally.

This behavior is a big change from the previous behavior, but it does bring it in line with how Vagrant behaves when used with VirtualBox (which uses a forwarded port on the loopback address for connectivity). The Libvirt provider uses an approach similar to previous versions of the VMware provider (an RFC 1918-style private address instead of a forwarded port on the loopback address).

All of this brings us to the original matter at hand: using Docker Machine and Vagrant together. If you’re using a Vagrant provider that does not use a forwarded port on the loopback address, then the command I provided in the original article (and earlier in this article) will work just fine.

If, on the other hand, you’re using a provider that does use a forwarded port on the loopback address, then you’ll need to amend the command slightly:

docker-machine create -d generic \
--generic-ssh-user vagrant \
--generic-ssh-key ~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key \
--generic-ssh-port 2222 \
--generic-ip-address 127.0.0.1 \
<name of VM>

Naturally, you’ll need to replace 2222 with the SSH port reported by vagrant ssh-config, since it may change when you’re running multiple VMs under Vagrant. (You may also need to change the username specified via --generic-ssh-user, since some distributions—I’m looking at you, CoreOS Container Linux—use a different username.)

Additionally, you’ll also need to forward port 2376 (the port that Docker uses to communicate across the network) in your Vagrantfile by adding a snippet like this:

# Configure port forwarding to support remote access to Docker Engine
config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 2376, host: 2376

With the forwarded port specified in the Vagrantfile and the updated docker-machine command that includes the correct SSH port, then you’ll be able to use Vagrant to provision/manage the VM(s) and use Docker Machine to provision/manage the Docker Engine(s).

If you have questions or corrections, feel free to drop me an email (my address isn’t terribly hard to find) or hit me up on Twitter.

Metadata and Navigation