Where does Vagrant download its .box files to?

Question

What happens to the .box file after the following command is executed?

vagrant box add lucid32 http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box

I can

Answer 1

The actual .box file is deleted by Vagrant once the download and box installation is complete. As mentioned in other answers, whilst downloading, the .box file is stored as:

~/.vagrant.d/tmp/boxXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

where the file name is 'box' followed by a 40 byte hexadecimal hash. A temporary file on my system for example, is:

~/.vagrant.d/tmp/boxc74a85fe4af3197a744851517c6af4d4959db77f

As far as I can tell, this file is never saved with a *.box extension, which explains why the searches above failed to locate it. There are two ways to retrieve the actual box file:

1. Download the .box file from vagrantcloud.com

   1. Find the box you're interested in on the atlas. For example, https://atlas.hashicorp.com/ubuntu/boxes/trusty64/versions/20150530.0.1
   2. Replace the domain name with vagrantcloud.com. So https://atlas.hashicorp.com/ubuntu/boxes/trusty64/versions/20150530.0.1 becomes https://vagrantcloud.com/ubuntu/boxes/trusty64/versions/20150530.0.1/providers/virtualbox.box.
   3. Add /providers/virtualbox.box to the end of that URL. So https://vagrantcloud.com/ubuntu/boxes/trusty64/versions/20150530.0.1 becomes https://vagrantcloud.com/ubuntu/boxes/trusty64/versions/20150530.0.1/providers/virtualbox.box
   4. Save the .box file
   5. Use the .box as you wish, for example, hosting it yourself and pointing config.vm.box_url to the URL. OR

2. Get the .box directly from Vagrant

   This requires you to modify the ruby source to prevent Vagrant from deleting the box after successful download.

   1. Locate the box_add.rb file in your Vagrant installation directory. On my system it's located at /Applications/Vagrant/embedded/gems/gems/vagrant-1.5.2/lib/vagrant/action/builtin/box_add.rb
   2. Find the box_add function. Within the box_add function, there is a block that reads:

      ensure # Make sure we delete the temporary file after we add it, # unless we were interrupted, in which case we keep it around # so we can resume the download later. if !@download_interrupted @logger.debug("Deleting temporary box: #{box_url}") begin box_url.delete if box_url rescue Errno::ENOENT # Not a big deal, the temp file may not actually exist end end

   3. Comment this block out.
   4. Add another box using vagrant add box .
   5. Wait for it to download. You can watch it save in the ~/.vagrant.d/tmp/ directory as a boxXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX file.
   6. Rename the the file to something more useful. Eg, mv boxXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX trusty64.box.

Why would you want this?

For me, this has been useful to retrieve the .box file so it can be hosted on local, fast infrastructure as opposed to downloading from HashiCorp's Atlas box catalog or another box provider.

This really should be part of the default Vagrant functionality as it has a very definitive use case.