I’m a huge fan of Vagrant’s recent omnibus style installer. It makes it so much easier to recommend to others as they can be up and running with Vagrant extremely quickly, instead of wondering why their distro packaged ruby installation isn’t working. However, because Vagrant is using an embedded ruby installation, other gems which add to vagrant are unable to find it.

One such tool is veewee, which makes it dead simple to automatically build VMs from kickstarter files and basic scripts. Version 0.2 also adds a great subcommand to Vagrant called ‘basebox’ which lets you use veewee to build baseboxes that Vagrant may then use to launch new VMs. But with Vagrant being run from its own embedded ruby environment, veewee is not able to find the vagrant gem to add to, making it a little harder to use for ruby newbies.

There is a way around this, though. If you were to run:

sudo /opt/vagrant/embedded/bin/gem install veewee --no-ri --no-rdoc

veewee is installed to the vagrant embedded environment and vagrant basebox is available and functions as expected. I’ve done this on my OSX 10.8 box that uses rbenv to manage ruby versions as well on a Ubuntu 12.04 box that uses rvm.

Let me know if this does or doesn’t work for you.