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I hesitate to call it the correct setup because I think only a small number of people use it, but the only solution I've found for Virtualbox that 1. does 2-way

I hesitate to call it the correct setup because I think only a small number of people use it, but the only solution I've found for Virtualbox that 1. does 2-way sync between host & guest 2. Propagates fs events (so you can run an auto-reloading service like webpack-dev-server on the guest that picks up changes on your host) and 3. is not significantly slower at disk reads & writes, is using Unison which is basically a 2-way rsync. There's this Vagrant extension [0] that works pretty well on mac at least (which I actually forked and pushed to rubygems a few years ago when I discovered it because it had been abandoned and no longer worked) Unfortunately the Vagrant team seems to have no interest in having all 3 of the properties I mentioned just work out of the box, I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just a lack of resources at Hashicorp, I'm not sure how much dev time they put into Vagrant these days since it's otherwise very mature and they have such a large number of open source projects. [0] https://github.com/dcosson/vagrant-unison2 https://github.com/dcosson/vagrant-unison2

jitl 9y ago
Thank you for your work! I used your vagrant-unison2 plugin for developer environments at Airbnb for a time, although we've now moved on to a more complex, home-grown Unison wrapper with Watchman for filesystem watches.
- smc12 9y ago
  Are there any plans to open-source this Unison wrapper?
e12e 9y ago
This looks very interesting - unison is a great tool. I rember fighting to get plan9 networking working with qemu/kvm and Linux, and never quite figuring out how to connect the dots. On paper it appears 9p should be a perfect fit for the use-case. (However, I just found [1] - maybe I'll give it another shot). But it seems kind of obvious that the functionality needed to get this stuff to work, is an entire network filesystem stack. It seems the obvious choices would be to build into VirtualBox either nfs, or webdav - or leverage host/external support for nfs, cifs, or something like OpenAFS. With sshfs as another pragmatic option. Maybe in the future ipfs will be a viable option too. But I think cifs is still the "mostly works, with/without complex auth, cross platform" - with webdav a distant second. [1] https://www.ueber.net/who/mjl/plan9/plan9-obsd.html https://www.ueber.net/who/mjl/plan9/plan9-obsd.html

jitl 9y ago

Thank you for your work! I used your vagrant-unison2 plugin for developer environments at Airbnb for a time, although we've now moved on to a more complex, home-grown Unison wrapper with Watchman for filesystem watches.

smc12 9y ago
Are there any plans to open-source this Unison wrapper?

e12e 9y ago

This looks very interesting - unison is a great tool. I rember fighting to get plan9 networking working with qemu/kvm and Linux, and never quite figuring out how to connect the dots. On paper it appears 9p should be a perfect fit for the use-case. (However, I just found [1] - maybe I'll give it another shot). But it seems kind of obvious that the functionality needed to get this stuff to work, is an entire network filesystem stack. It seems the obvious choices would be to build into VirtualBox either nfs, or webdav - or leverage host/external support for nfs, cifs, or something like OpenAFS. With sshfs as another pragmatic option. Maybe in the future ipfs will be a viable option too. But I think cifs is still the "mostly works, with/without complex auth, cross platform" - with webdav a distant second. [1] https://www.ueber.net/who/mjl/plan9/plan9-obsd.html https://www.ueber.net/who/mjl/plan9/plan9-obsd.html