The Vagrant file option gives you an easy way to copy a file from your host machine onto the Vagrant machine during the startup process.

This can be a great way of uploading a configuration file that would otherwise need to be created by the software or possibly required before the software can start working. An example of this would be an .env file that holds environment variables, such as database-connection details or special keys.

There are two options available – you can copy/upload a single file or an entire directory from your host machine to the guest Vagrant machine.

When using this option, we set the provision option to file in our Vagrantfile, for example:

config.vm.provision "file"