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Discovering Vagrant Boxes

website/content/vagrant-cloud/boxes/catalog.mdx

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[!IMPORTANT]
Documentation Update: Product documentation previously located in /website has moved to the hashicorp/web-unified-docs repository, where all product documentation is now centralized. Please make contributions directly to web-unified-docs, since changes to /website in this repository will not appear on developer.hashicorp.com. ⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️

Discovering Vagrant Boxes

Vagrant Cloud serves a public, searchable index of Vagrant boxes. It's easy to find boxes you can use with Vagrant that contain the technologies you need for a Vagrant environment.

You don't need a Vagrant Cloud account to use public boxes.

  1. Go to the Box search page.

  2. Once you find a box, click its name to learn more about it.

  3. When you're ready to use it, copy the name, such as "hashicorp/bionic64" and initialize your Vagrant project with vagrant init hashicorp/bionic64. Or, if you already have a Vagrant project created, modify the Vagrantfile to use the box: config.vm.box = "hashicorp/bionic64".

Provider Support

Not all boxes are available for all providers. You may need to sort by a provider that you have on your local system to narrow down your search.

Choosing the Right Box

As with all software and configuration used from a public source, it's important to keep in mind whose box you're using. Here are some things to note when you're choosing a box:

  • The username of the user. If it's bento or ubuntu, you can likely trust the box more than an anonymous user.
  • The number of downloads of the box. Heavily downloaded boxes are likely vetted more often by other members of the community. HashiCorp responds to reports of malicious software distributed via Vagrant Cloud by disabling and/or removing boxes. If you find a box which includes malicious software, please contact support to make a report.
  • The latest release date. Boxes which are updated periodically or which have recent release dates will generally contain more up-to-date software.
  • Availability of the box download. Vagrant Cloud periodically checks if a box which is externally hosted (hosted by the box author, not Vagrant Cloud) is publicly accessible. You can see this information on the box page next to the provider.