How to fix Vagrant Loading the Wrong Virtual Machine

A few times recently, I've had instances where Vagrant seems to have forgotten which virtual machine it's supposed to load, probably due to renaming a project directory or the .vagrant directory being moved accidentally.

Here are the steps that I took to fix this and point Vagrant back at the correct VM.

  1. Stop the machine from running using the $ vagrant halt command.
  2. Use the $ VBoxManage list vms command to view a list of the virtual machines on your system. Note the ID of the correct VM that should be loading. For example, "foo_default_1405481857614_74478" {e492bfc3-cac2-4cde-a396-e81e37e421e2}. The number within the curly brackets is the ID of the virtual machine.
  3. Within the .vagrant directory in your project (it is hidden by default), update the ID within the machines/default/virtualbox/id file.
  4. Start the new VM with $ vagrant up.

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About me

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I'm an Acquia-certified Drupal Triple Expert with 17 years of experience, an open-source software maintainer and Drupal core contributor, public speaker, live streamer, and host of the Beyond Blocks podcast.