Make Vagrant Synced folders on Ubuntu Xenial guest work on Mac

Wed, Jul 20, 2016

Today I installed latest Vagrant, version 1.8.5. I was waiting for a newer release because 1.8.1 and previous versions don't work well with host-only networks for Ubuntu Xenial (16.04) guests on my Mac running El Capitan. But I faced another issue now:

mount: unknown filesystem type 'vboxsf'

This is while specifying a synced folder in my Vagrantfile with this line:

config.vm.synced_folder("/Users/apple/src/myutils", "/home/ubuntu/myutils")

where myutils is where I keep all my commandline shortcuts, tricks, and other shortcut-ish stuff. I Googled but couldn't find an article which described a way to fix this in one go, hence this blog post :)

The actual answer is pretty simple. Just install the ‘vbguest’ plugin.

vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

Of course I'm assuming you're running Vagrant with VirtualBox :)

After that just shut down the VM (vagrant halt <vmname>), and start it again (vagrant up <vmname>), and everything should work as expected. I noticed two things:

1. Vagrant tries to install guest additions inside the VM by doing some apt-get stuff. Don't worry about it and let it finish.
2. Note that unlike Ubuntu Trusty (14.04), my hostname on Ubuntu Xenial is ubuntu and not vagrant, so change the synced_folder line in your Vagrantfile accordingly.

Cheers!

-Rushi