SSH onto Vagrant Box With Different Username

ssh vagrant
Kevin Meredith picture Kevin Meredith · Mar 25, 2014 · Viewed 61.9k times · Source

Rather than ssh-ing onto my Vagrant virtual machine with a "vagrant" user-name and password, I'd like to use kevin/kevin.

I modified my Vagrantfile to include:

config.ssh.username = "kevin"

Then, I ran vagrant reload.

The following output showed up:

[default] Waiting for machine to boot. This may take a few minutes...
Timed out while waiting for the machine to boot. This means that
Vagrant was unable to communicate with the guest machine within
the configured ("config.vm.boot_timeout" value) time period. This can
mean a number of things.

However, I could still ssh onto my vagrant box using vagrant/vagrant, yet I I couldn't ssh onto the box with a user-name and password of kevin/kevin or kevin/vagrant.

Note that I also tried this answer (https://stackoverflow.com/a/9924122/409976), but I could only ssh onto the box with user-name vagrant, not kevin (even though it's specified in the Vagrantfile).

How can I configure my Vagrantfile so that I can ssh using user-name kevin?

Answer

Terry Wang picture Terry Wang · Mar 26, 2014

You can ssh to the box using vagrant but NOT kevin, that's expected.

Most Vagrant base boxes have only 2 users with SSH access, root and vagrant. They both use vagrant as password, in addition, vagrant is configured for public key authentication using the insecure (why? see Vagrant insecure by default?) key pair provided in the Vagrant project on GitHub.

To be able to login as kevin, you'll have to ssh into the box and create the user (useradd -m -s /bin/bash -U kevin) first, configure public key authentication (many ways e.g ssh-copy-id, I'll leave it to you.)

You should be able to ssh into the box after creating the user using vagrant ssh if you properly set config.ssh.username in Vagrantfile.

Of course you can manually ssh into the box by (assume NAT is in use)

ssh -p 2222 kevin@localhost

or (on Linux)

ssh -p 2222 -i /opt/vagrant/embedded/gems/gems/vagrant-1.5.1/keys/vagrant.pub vagrant@localhost

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