Vagrant file system notification forwarder plugin

A vagrant plugin that uses notify-forwarder to forward file system events from the host to the guest automatically on all shared folders.

This is useful for auto reloading file systems that rebuild when files change. Normally, they have to use CPU intensive polling when watching shared folders. This plugin makes them able to use inotify or similar for improved performance and reduced CPU usage.

Installation

brew install antimatter-studios/tap/vagrant-notify-forwarder

This downloads the gem and runs vagrant plugin install automatically.

Manual install

vagrant plugin install vagrant-notify-forwarder2

Or from a specific release:

curl -fsSL -o /tmp/vagrant-notify-forwarder2.gem \
  https://github.com/christhomas/vagrant-notify-forwarder/releases/download/v0.6.3/vagrant-notify-forwarder2-0.6.3.gem
vagrant plugin install /tmp/vagrant-notify-forwarder2.gem

After installing, reload your Vagrant environment:

vagrant reload

Configuration

Port

By default, the plugin uses UDP port 29324. If multiple VMs are running, the port is automatically corrected to the next available port (tries up to 10 ports).

To set a specific port:

config.notify_forwarder.port = 22020

Disabling

To disable the plugin for a specific machine:

config.notify_forwarder.enable = false

Permissions

The client in the guest OS runs as root by default, assuming passwordless sudo works. To disable privilege escalation:

config.notify_forwarder.run_as_root = false

Overriding binary sources

The plugin ships with a default map of download URLs and SHA256 checksums for each supported [os, hardware] combination. You can override or extend the map via config.notify_forwarder.binaries:

config.notify_forwarder.binaries = {
  [:darwin, :arm64] => {
    url: "https://example.com/notify-forwarder-osx-arm64",
    sha256: "deadbeef..."
  },
  [:linux, :riscv64] => [
    "https://example.com/notify-forwarder-linux-riscv64",
    "cafebabe..."
  ]
}

You may supply each entry either as an array [url, sha256] or a hash with :url/:sha256 keys. Entries you omit continue using the built-in defaults.

Supported platforms

The plugin downloads binaries for supported platforms:

Platform Host Guest
Linux arm64 ✓ ✓
Linux armv7l — ✓
Linux x86_64 ✓ ✓
macOS arm64 ✓ —
macOS x86_64 ✓ —

Development

Use Bundler and the project Rakefile to keep all tooling local to the repository.

  1. Install dependencies:
   rake dev:bundle
  1. Build the gem:
   bundle exec rake dev:build
  1. Install locally for testing:
   bundle exec rake dev:install
  1. Launch or reload Vagrant:
   bundle exec rake dev:up
   bundle exec rake dev:reload

Contributors