Can I force provisioning to happen before mounting shared folders in Vagrant?

Question

I have the following Vagrantfile:

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

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "centos/6"
  config.vm.provision :shell, :path => "bootstrap.sh"
  config.vm.network :forwarded_port, host: 8080, guest: 80
  config.vm.network :forwarded_port, host: 3306, guest: 3306
  config.vm.synced_folder "../../applications", "/var/www/html", :owner=>"apache", :group=>"apache"

  config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |vb|
      vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", 2048]
      vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--natdnshostresolver1", "on"]
      vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--natdnsproxy1", "on"]
      vb.name = "appserver"
   end
end

Each time I run vagrant up (for first time, let's say that first I ran vagrant destroy -f) I end up with the following error:

==> default: Mounting shared folders...
    default: /vagrant => E:/Development/vagrant/centos6
    default: /var/www/html => E:/Development/applications/arx
Vagrant was unable to mount VirtualBox shared folders. This is usually
because the filesystem "vboxsf" is not available. This filesystem is
made available via the VirtualBox Guest Additions and kernel module.
Please verify that these guest additions are properly installed in the
guest. This is not a bug in Vagrant and is usually caused by a faulty
Vagrant box. For context, the command attempted was:

id -u apache    
The error output from the command was:    
id: apache: No such user

The error is pretty clear "apache user does not exists". As I am seeing this there is two or "three" ways to fix this:

• By removing the :owner=>"apache", :group=>"apache" portion from the synced_folder. This is a BIG no, at least for me because if I remove them then the folder will be owned by vagrant which will/could cause issues while apache tries to read something from /var/www/html.
• By commenting the line config.vm.synced_folder, getting up the box so everything gets installed and setup, then shutting down the box and getting up again with the line uncommented: it works but still an ugly solution
• By forcing the provisioning to happen before anything gets mounted: the ideal solution.

Does any know if this is possible and if so how? I wasn't able to found anything regarding the 3rd solution :( if you have a better solution you're more than welcome to post here it might help me and others probably.

I have found this and this but is not helpful.

Answer 1

one potential solution would be to run apache as vagrant user.

In your /etc/httpd/conf you can replace the User and Group value as

User vagrant
Group vagrant

so you can continue sharing your folder with vagrant user and httpd will be run as vagrant user.