Vagrant Meta Data is Corrupt

Question

Hope someone can help out here. I'm trying to version self hosted vagrant boxes, so doing this without using Vagrant Cloud.

I've created the following meta data file:

{
  "description": "How about this",
  "name": "Graphite",
  "versions": [
    {
      "version": "1.8",
      "providers": [
        {
          "name": "virtualbox",
          "url": "http://desktopenvironments/Graphite/Graphite_1.8.box"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

This is taken directly from the vagrant (somewhat lacking) documentation found at: http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/boxes/format.html.

When running a vagrant add (taking the box file that contains this file directly from disk) I get:

The metadata associated with the box 'graphite' appears corrupted.
This is most often caused by a disk issue or system crash. Please
remove the box, re-add it, and try again.

Any assistance as to why this is happening would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Was generating my metadata file from a c# app I wrote, using UTF8 for text encoding. This is not enough. You need to use UTF8 without BOM. Once the Byte Order Mark was removed it all works 100s.

var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings() { ContractResolver = new LowercaseContractResolver() };
string json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(metadata, Formatting.None, settings);
var utf8WithoutBom = new System.Text.UTF8Encoding(false);
using (var sink = new StreamWriter(outputFilePath, false, utf8WithoutBom))
{
    sink.Write(json);
}