How to run bash script with commands in tests in vagrant?

Question

Running commands or script lines with simple tests, like -e , in vagrant using the ssh subcommand works fine (eg

vagrant ssh -c 'if ! [ -e file.deb ] ; then wget http://a.b/file.deb; fi'

as soon as string comparison and command execution bash quoting gets involved, complexity immediately rises to the sky. I tried

• escaping strings, but that doesn't seem to work in general (complexity of escaping of escaping of escaping ... in bash is just inacceptable)

• writing everything in a script file with cat <<EOF > file [code]EOF idiom, eg

   vagrant ssh -c 'cat <<EOF > fetch.sh \\ #!/bin/bash \\ if [ "$(md5sum file.deb | cut -d \\" \\" -f 1)" != "d757d51819f8f945ae7715b532ab8d2e" ] ; then wget http://a/b/file.deb; fi \\ EOF' vagrant ssh -c 'bash ./fetch.sh' 

  causes ./fetch.sh: line 1: syntax error near unexpected token `if'

• the failure of the cat EOF idiom implies failure of any sort of script created in vagrant ( python , groovy , etc. would suffer from the same incapacity of bash to provide usable string quoting/be usable at all)

Is there any way to execute script code with complex statements in tests inside a vagrant box? Do I seriously need to transfer the script via the localhost interface (using FTP or something similar)?

Answer 1

With knowledge of How to use SSH to run a shell script on a remote machine? it's possible to connect to vagrant using

ssh -p [port] -i [keyfile] vagrant@localhost 'bash -s' < script.sh

(with [port] and [keyfile] retrieved from vagrant ssh-config ) and the script code put in script.sh .

The port can change if multiple vagrant instances are running (each starting its own SSH server), so you might need to parse vagrant ssh-config .