Ansible SSH forwarding doesn't seem to work with Vagrant

Question

OK, strange question. I have SSH forwarding working with Vagrant. But I\'m trying to get it working when using Ansible as a Vagrant provisioner.

I found out exactly what

Answer 1

Here's a workaround:

Create an ansible.cfg file in the same directory as your Vagrantfile with the following lines:

[ssh_connection]
ssh_args = -o ControlMaster=auto -o ControlPersist=60s -o ForwardAgent=yes

Answer 2

As of ansible 1.5 (devel aa2d6e47f0) last updated 2014/03/24 14:23:18 (GMT +100) and Vagrant 1.5.1 this now works.

My Vagrant configuration contains the following:

config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible|
   ansible.playbook = "../playbooks/basho_bench.yml"
   ansible.sudo = true
   ansible.host_key_checking = false
   ansible.verbose =  'vvvv'
   ansible.extra_vars = { ansible_ssh_user: 'vagrant', 
                 ansible_connection: 'ssh',
                 ansible_ssh_args: '-o ForwardAgent=yes'}

It is also a good idea to explicitly disable sudo use. For example, when using the Ansible git module, I do this:

- name: checkout basho_bench repository 
  sudo: no
  action: git repo=git@github.com:basho/basho_bench.git dest=basho_bench

Answer 3

The key difference appears to be the UserKnownHostFile setting. Even with StrictHostKeyChecking turned off, ssh quietly disables certain features including agent forwarding when there is a conflicting entry in the known hosts file (these conflicts are common for vagrant since multiple VMs may have the same address at different times). It works for me if I point UserKnownHostFile to /dev/null:

config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible|
  ansible.playbook = "playbook.yml"

  ansible.raw_ssh_args = ['-o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null']
end

Answer 4

You can simply add this line to your Vagrantfile to enable the ssh forwarding:

config.ssh.forward_agent = true

Note: Don't forget to execute the task with become: false

Hope, this will help.

Answer 5

I struggled with a very similar problem for a few hours. Vagrant 1.7.2 ansible 1.9.4

My symptoms:

failed: [vagrant1] => {"cmd": "/usr/bin/git ls-remote '' -h refs/heads/HEAD", "failed": true, "rc": 128}
stderr: Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

msg: Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

FATAL: all hosts have already failed -- aborting

SSH'ing into the guest, I found that my ssh-agent was forwarding as expected:

vagrant@vagrant-ubuntu-trusty-64:~$ ssh -T git@github.com
Hi baxline! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.

However, from the host machine, I could not open the connection:

$ ansible web -a "ssh-add -L"
vagrant1 | FAILED | rc=2 >>
Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.

After confirming that my ansible.cfg file was set up, as @Lorin noted, and my Vagrantfile set config.ssh.forward_agent = true, I still came up short.

The solution was to delete all lines in my host's ~/.ssh/known_hosts file that were associated with my guest. For me, they were the lines that started with:

[127.0.0.1]:2201 ssh-rsa
[127.0.0.1]:2222 ssh-rsa
[127.0.01]:2222 ssh-rsa
[127.0.0.1]:2200 ssh-rsa

Note the third line has a funny ip address. I'm not certain, but I believe that line was the culprit. These lines are created as I destroy and create vagrant VMs.

Answer 6

I've found that I need to do two separate things (on Ubuntu 12.04) to get it working:

• the -o ForwardAgent thing that @Lorin mentions

• adding /etc/sudoers.d/01-make_SSH_AUTH_SOCK_AVAILABLE with these contents:

  Defaults env_keep += "SSH_AUTH_SOCK"