Vagrant 1.9.4

We are pleased to announce the release of Vagrant 1.9.4. This release includes new features as well as many improvements and bug fixes. Download Vagrant 1.9.4 here.

Vagrant 1.9.4 includes a couple new features and a number of improvements:

• Validate Command - Added a new validate command for quickly validating the current Vagrantfile in use.
• WinSSH Communicator - Added a new communicator for connecting to Windows guests running the Win32-OpenSSH port. The functionality of this communicator is similar to the existing SSH communicator without the requirement of a POSIX-like environment.
• Chef Support on FreeBSD - Chef support has been added for FreeBSD guests.
• Windows SSH Synced Folders - Synced folders can now be properly setup when the SSH communicator is being used.
• Windows Internationalization - Many updates were made to fix encoding issues caused by incorrect handling of unicode characters based on localization settings. This fixes many installation and usage problems that were experienced when unicode characters were present within the path.

Many more improvements and bug fixes are included in this release. Please review the v1.9.4 changelog for a detailed list of changes.

»WinSSH Communicator

The new WinSSH communicator introduced in this release is specifically built for Windows guests. The communicator is very similar to the current SSH communicator but does not require a POSIX-like environment. By removing the POSIX requirement, Vagrant is now able to connect and communicate with the Win32-OpenSSH service. Enabling the new communicator is as simple as setting the configuration option in the Vagrantfile:

Vagrantfile.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "example/windows-10"
  config.vm.communicator = :winssh
end

The WinSSH communicator uses a cmd.exe shell by default when connecting to a Windows host and running commands. It can also be configured to use Powershell when connecting:

Vagrantfile.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "example/windows-10"
  config.vm.communicator = :winssh
  config.winssh.shell = :powershell
end

To find out more about the WinSSH communicator, see the WinSSH communicator documentation page.