---
layout: docs
page_title: vagrant ssh - Command-Line Interface
description: |-
  The "vagrant ssh" command is used to establish an SSH session into a running
  virtual machine to give you shell access.
---

# SSH

**Command: `vagrant ssh [name|id] [-- extra_ssh_args]`**

This will SSH into a running Vagrant machine and give you access to a shell.

On a simple vagrant project, the instance created will be named default.

Vagrant will ssh into this instance without the instance name:

```shell-session
$ vagrant ssh

Welcome to your Vagrant-built virtual machine.
Last login: Fri Sep 14 06:23:18 2012 from 10.0.2.2
$ logout
Connection to 127.0.0.1 closed.
```

Or you could use the name:

```shell-session
$ vagrant ssh default


Welcome to your Vagrant-built virtual machine.
Last login: Fri Jul 20 15:09:52 2018 from 10.0.2.2
$ logout
Connection to 127.0.0.1 closed.
$
```

On multi-machine setups, you can login to each VM using the name as displayed
on `vagrant status`

```shell-session
$ vagrant status
Current machine states:

node1                     running (virtualbox)
node2                     running (virtualbox)

This environment represents multiple VMs. The VMs are all listed
above with their current state.
$ vagrant ssh node1

Welcome to your Vagrant-built virtual machine.
Last login: Fri Sep 14 06:23:18 2012 from 10.0.2.2
vagrant@bionic64:~$ logout
Connection to 127.0.0.1 closed.
$ vagrant ssh node2

Welcome to your Vagrant-built virtual machine.
Last login: Fri Sep 14 06:23:18 2012 from 10.0.2.2
vagrant@bionic64:~$ logout
Connection to 127.0.0.1 closed.
$
```

On a system with machines running from different projects, you could use the id
as listed in `vagrant global-status`

```shell-session
$ vagrant global-status
id       name   provider   state   directory
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
13759ff  node1  virtualbox running /Users/user/vagrant/folder

The above shows information about all known Vagrant environments
on this machine. This data is cached and may not be completely
up-to-date (use "vagrant global-status --prune" to prune invalid
entries). To interact with any of the machines, you can go to that
directory and run Vagrant, or you can use the ID directly with
Vagrant commands from any directory.
$ vagrant ssh 13759ff

Welcome to your Vagrant-built virtual machine.
Last login: Fri Jul 20 15:19:36 2018 from 10.0.2.2
vagrant@bionic64:~$ logout
Connection to 127.0.0.1 closed.
$
```

If a `--` (two hyphens) are found on the command line, any arguments after
this are passed directly into the `ssh` executable. This allows you to pass
any arbitrary commands to do things such as reverse tunneling down into the
`ssh` program.

## Options

- `-c COMMAND` or `--command COMMAND` - This executes a single SSH command, prints
  out the stdout and stderr, and exits.

- `-p` or `--plain` - This does an SSH without authentication, leaving
  authentication up to the user.

## SSH client usage

Vagrant will attempt to use the local SSH client installed on the host machine. On
POSIX machines, an SSH client must be installed and available on the PATH.

For Windows installations, an SSH client is provided within the installer
image. If no SSH client is found on the current PATH, Vagrant will use the
SSH client it provided. Depending on the local environment used for running
Vagrant, the installer provided SSH client may not work correctly. For example,
when using a cygwin or msys2 shell the SSH client will fail to work as expected
when run interactively. Installing the SSH package built for the current working
environment will resolve this issue.

## Background Execution

If the command you specify runs in the background (such as appending a `&` to
a shell command), it will be terminated almost immediately. This is because
when Vagrant executes the command, it executes it within the context of a
shell, and when the shell exits, all of the child processes also exit.

To avoid this, you will need to detach the process from the shell. Please
Google to learn how to do this for your shell. One method of doing this is
the `nohup` command.

## Pageant on Windows

The SSH executable will not be able to access Pageant on Windows. While
Vagrant is capable of accessing Pageant via internal libraries, the
SSH executable does not have support for Pageant. This means keys
from Pageant will not be available for forwarding when using the
`vagrant ssh` command.

Third party programs exist to allow the SSH executable to access Pageant
by creating a Unix socket for the SSH executable to read. For more information
please see [ssh-pageant](https://github.com/cuviper/ssh-pageant).
