Vagrant files, *.box, are pre-configured Virtual Machines (VM) VM images, which when imported into HashiCorp’s Vagrant, allow for VMs to be interacted with via the command line.
You create, start, interact, stop, destroy VMs all without leaving the terminal. Think containers (Docker/Podman), but for VMs.
Previously we have been using images.
Packer is a wrapper, around whatever hypervisor you wish, and it will automate installing the OS (unattended setup via , we have been using . This has been working great for us.
Recently we realized: “Why do we have two different systems, for the same purpose?”.
A little bit of digging into “)
sudo)Simple really, just need to make sure that Vagrant can easy access the VM!
Optional items (and recommended), as it helps benefits user’s rather than Vagrant:
- Known/Fix credentials (
vagranteverywhere) - SSH tweaks (speed up for airgap networks)
All of this can be handled in a later to upstream, and support has been added. As a result, trying to use Kali 2025.2 or higher on Windows using Hyper-V, using vagrant older than v2.4.7 will NOT work. You need to use either an older Kali, different hypervisor, manually patch or to upgrade Vagrant to be v2.4.8 (released 2025-08-05) or higher.
As Packer is no longer generating our Vagrant VMs, we renamed the git repository ().
Finally, before sunsetting our Packer build-scripts, we did a refresh of these build-scripts one more time. We might not be using it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t.
Demo
After getting
SOCIAL SHARE CARD GENERATOR