Vagrant VMware Desktop Providers

This is the common codebase for the official providers for VMware desktop products: Fusion, Player, and Workstation. This therefore works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Box Format

All the desktop plugins share a common box format known as vmware_desktop. The plugins also all support the formats vmware_fusion, vmware_workstation, and vmware_player.

Developing

There are two separate parts which work together to provide the vagrant-vmware-desktop functionality. The first is the vagrant-vmware-desktop RubyGem. This does the bulk of the work for the plugin. The second part is a vagrant-vmware-utility service that the vagrant-vmware-desktop plugin interacts with. The purpose of this part of the plugin is to do operations which require privleged access on the host. This includes network operations and verification of fusion/workstation.

RubyGem - Desktop plugin

Using bundler allows for local development. If you need to test the RubyGem plugin on another system you can build a gem by building directly:

gem build vagrant-vmware-desktop.gemspec

Utility Service

This part of the plugin lives in the go_src directory and is required to be running when using the vagrant-vmware-desktop plugin. To build and start it:

Linux / macOS

cd go_src/vagrant-vmware-utility
go build
./vagrant-vmware-utility certificate generate
sudo ./vagrant-vmware-utility api

Windows

In a user console, run:

cd go_src\vagrant-vmware-utility
go build
.\vagrant-vmware-utility certificate generate

In an administrator console, run:

cd go_src\vagrant-vmware-utility
.\vagrant-vmware-utility api

Certificates

The plugin interacts with the utility service via a REST API. The utility service creates these certificates with the certificate generate command:

./vagrant-vmware-utility certificate generate

This will output the path to certificates directory. Because a development build is in use, the plugin will be unable to locate the certificates to communicate with the API. The plugin can be configured with the directory path:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.provider :vmware_desktop do |vmware|
    vmware.utility_certificate_path = "PATH"
  end
end

Another option is to link the certificates directory to the location the plugin expects to find them:

$ sudo mkdir /opt/vagrant-vmware-desktop
$ sudo ln -s PATH /opt/vagrant-vmware-desktop/certificates