Vagrant: Enable/Disable plugins on a per Vagrantfile basis

[reset]

Some plugins may not fit for every project that is leveraging Vagrant. As is, all plugins which are installed are loaded when Vagrant starts. It would be awesome if a plugin author had the option to lazily load their plugins and require users to manually require these plugins in their Vagrantfile.

A good example plugin which may not need to be loaded for every project is Berkshelf-Vagrant. We're currently taking steps to add our own 'enable' configuration flag which will cause the middleware to do a no-op.

[bflad]

Sort of relates to #1700 as well if implemented correctly.

I could envision the Vagrantfile then accepting something like:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  # simple load
  config.plugin 'vagrant-berkshelf'
  # maybe more advanced logic
  config.plugin 'vagrant-berkshelf' do |plugin|
    plugin.version '>1.2.0'
  end
  #...
end

Where it could install the plugin automatically if it's not available and fix your lazy loading issue.

For reference, here's the offending code when a Vagrant environment is spinning up that loads all external plugins:
https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/blob/master/lib/vagrant/environment.rb#L132
https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/blob/master/lib/vagrant/environment.rb#L742-L776

Maybe the load_plugins function should be unprotected or moved closer to the Vagrant kernel and optionally take an array of plugins to load (nil loading all)?

[fgrehm]

Hey guys, here's my take on the problem: https://github.com/fgrehm/vundler :)

[mitchellh]

I think for now delegating this out to Vundler is ideal. Closing.

[erunion]

Why not move it into core instead of having to have everyone use a plugin to manage plugins?

[leifmadsen]

Yo dawg, I heard you like plugins, so we let you manage your plugins with a plugin.

[mitchellh]

The goal is to eventually move this into core, but this provides a good stand-in.

[nikolay]

:+1: This definitely should be part of the core and I hope to see it there soon!

[nikolay]

I though like the approach of specifying dependency plugins in https://github.com/tknerr/vagrant-plugin-bundler better than with Binder as the vast majority of projects won't have too many plugins and having a separate file is a bit of a overkill. You can with the approach of vagrant-plugin-bundler, you can parse an external file in .json, .yml, or any other format easily (if you _really_ need it). What if those dependencies are determined at runtime, etc.

[erunion]

@mitchellh Awesome.

[gregelin]

Please, please include this in the core. Typing vagrant up is magic. Having to separately install anything diminishes the magic.

[imduffy15]

Why is this closed? vagrant-plugin-bundler and Vundler are both unmaintained leaving this unsolved.

[dasgoll]

Shouldn't this fucntionality be in core??

[jhoblitt]

I'm running into vagrant-librarian-puppet being incompatible with puppet-aws when its parallelizing. It would be great to not have to uninstall a plugin to disable it...

[amosshapira]

Same situation as @jhoblitt - I use vagrant-vbguest which only supports Linux, so it breaks my OSX Vagrant boxes...

[chillum]

Same situation as @amontalban, vargrant-vbguest works with Linux, but breaks FreeBSD.

[varac]

I love vagrant-sshfs which works great for vagrant-libvirt but breaks with vagrant-lxc :(
So @mitchellh please consider this functionality in vagrant-core, because the the workaround you proposed isn't valid anymore now that vundler is not maintained anymore.

[robinbowes]

Really? Is there no native way to disable plugins on a per-environment basis?

[wmantly]

Any update on this?

[hashibot[bot]]

I'm going to lock this issue because it has been closed for _30 days_ ⏳. This helps our maintainers find and focus on the active issues.

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