vagrant and my virtual machine - vagrant reload - default: VM not created. Moving on

Question

I went to load up my dev/localhost environment today and when i opened terminal and cd .. to my destination localhost folder. I do what i do everyday and i vagrant reload. Generally my localhost is up in about 30 seconds after entering my password.

Today when i tried to vagrant reload i got the message "default: VM not created. Moving on..."

I then tried to vagrant up to see if it was maybe down for some reason and i got the error message

Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider...
==> default: Box 'base' could not be found. Attempting to find and install...
    default: Box Provider: virtualbox
    default: Box Version: >= 0
==> default: Box file was not detected as metadata. Adding it directly...
==> default: Adding box 'base' (v0) for provider: virtualbox
    default: Downloading: base
An error occurred while downloading the remote file. The error
message, if any, is reproduced below. Please fix this error and try
again.

Couldn't open file /Users/me/Documents/Development/website/www/base

On the browser side of things the page just looks like this:

Index of /

[ICO]   Name    Last modified   Size    Description
Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu) Server at dev.webite.com Port 80

How do i get my localhost running again? It's like my machine was deleted or disappeared.

My vagrant file:

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

# Vagrantfile API/syntax version. Don't touch unless you know what you're doing!

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|

  config.vm.box = "magento"

  config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 80, host: 8085

  # config.vm.network :public_network
  config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.19.88"

  config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", type: "nfs"

  config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |vb|
    #vb.gui = true
    vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", "4096"]
    vb.cpus = 4

  end

end

Answer 1

The issue was that vagrant created another VM in virtual box while the correct instance existed.

To be able to operate the correct virtual box VM from vagrant, follow the steps:

1. run VBoxManage list runningvms and note the ID of the VM that you want to operate

2. edit the file .vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/id and set the ID found in step above

3. run vagrant command (halt/up) will operate the expected VM

OLD ANSWER If you use a custom base box its probably better to:

1. add the box to vagrant

   vagrant box add <name of your box : base> <path to the box file>
   

2. init and up vagrant with this box

   vagrant box init <name of your box : base>
   vagrant up
   

If you want to reference a config.vm.box_url to be a local file you must specify as the path to the box file (not a directory - vagrant will uncompress for you)

config.vm.box_url = "file://<path to a box file>"