Aliases

Inspired in part by Git's own alias functionality, aliases make your Vagrant experience simpler, easier, and more familiar by allowing you to create your own custom Vagrant commands.

Aliases can be defined within VAGRANT_HOME/aliases file, or in a custom file defined using the VAGRANT_ALIAS_FILE environment variable, in the following format:

# basic command-level aliases
start = up
stop = halt

# advanced command-line aliases
eradicate = !vagrant destroy && rm -rf .vagrant

In a nutshell, aliases are defined using a standard key = value format, where the key is the new Vagrant command, and the value is the aliased command. Using this format, there are two types of aliases that can be defined: internal and external aliases.

Internal Aliases

Internal command aliases call the CLI class directly, allowing you to alias one Vagrant command to another Vagrant command. This technique can be very useful for creating commands that you think should exist. For example, if vagrant stop feels more intuitive than vagrant halt, the following alias definitions would make that change possible:

stop = halt

This makes the following commands equivalent:

vagrant stop
vagrant halt

External Aliases

While internal aliases can be used to define more intuitive Vagrant commands, external command aliases are used to define Vagrant commands with brand new functionality. These aliases are prefixed with the ! character, which indicates to the interpreter that the alias should be executed as a shell command. For example, let's say that you want to be able to view the processor and memory utilization of the active project's virtual machine. To do this, you could define a vagrant metrics command that returns the required information in an easy-to-read format, like so:

metrics = !ps aux | grep "[V]BoxHeadless" | grep $(cat .vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/id) | awk '{ printf("CPU: %.02f%%, Memory: %.02f%%", $3, $4) }'

The above alias, from within the context of an active Vagrant project, would print the CPU and memory utilization directly to the console:

CPU: 4.20%, Memory: 11.00%