I recently started experimenting with Vagrant (v1.5.1), Puppet (v3.5.1) and VirtualBox (v4.3.10) to replace my MAMP environment. I used the config.vm.synced_folder method in Vagrant to share a folder of websites with the virtual machine.

Since a few directories, like caching and user uploads, need to be writable by Apache, I figured I’d use Puppet to set those permissions, but regardless of where I specified that requirement, it never took effect — and Puppet did try:

Notice: /Stage[main]/Ryse_apache/File[/var/www/domains/domain.com/www/htdocs/wp-content/cache]/owner: owner changed 'vagrant' to 'apache'
Notice: /Stage[main]/Ryse_apache/File[/var/www/domains/domain.com/www/htdocs/wp-content/cache]/group: group changed 'vagrant' to 'apache'

I found out that this was a limitation with VirtualBox and how it shares folders.

Now, Vagrant does have additional options that can be set when sharing a folder that allow you to specify the owner and group, but the problem is that Puppet installs Apache, and since the folders are shared before the Puppet provisioner runs, the Apache user does not yet exist.

This is the error you get:

Failed to mount folders in Linux guest. This is usually because
the "vboxsf" file system is not available. Please verify that
the guest additions are properly installed in the guest and
can work properly. The command attempted was:

mount -t vboxsf -o uid=`id -u apache`,gid=`getent group apache | cut -d: -f3` /var/www/domains /var/www/domains
mount -t vboxsf -o uid=`id -u apache`,gid=`id -g apache` /var/www/domains /var/www/domains

Let’s look at a few solutions on how to allow Apache to write to the folders it needs to, and which solution I ended up implementing. If you have a different permissions problem, you might still be able to tweak one of the solutions below, since they broadly cover an array of issues.

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