How can I relocate or disable the VirtualBox logfile when starting a vm from Vagrant?

Question

When I run vagrant up using VirtualBox as a provider, it creates a logfile called ubuntu-xenial-16.04-cloudimg-console.log in the project root. This causes difficulty with PHPStorm, as it doesn't have an option to exclude individual files from search, only folders.

I would like to have this logfile created in the _log directory instead, but I cannot find how to configure its location; there doesn't seem to be anything in the Vagrantfile documentation, and I can't find an option in the VirtualBox GUI.

I've also tried symlinking the file to /dev/null, but VirtualBox refuses to even start if the link is there. I can't simply delete the file while the VM is up, as it holds a lock on it.

A simplified version of the Vagrantfile is below:

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

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "ubuntu/xenial64"

  config.disksize.size = "10GB"

  config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 80, host: 80, host_ip: "127.0.0.1"
  config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 3306, host: 3306, host_ip: "127.0.0.1"

  config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/var/www/html"

  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
    vb.gui = false
    vb.memory = "2048"
  end

  config.vm.provision "shell", inline: <<-SHELL
    # redacted
  SHELL
end

How can I change the log location? Or, if that's possible, how can I prevent it from being generated in the first place?

Answer 1

I managed to change the log file location as per this post. To change the log file location to a folder called /temp relative to my Vagrantfile, I added this to the Vagrantfile (inside the Vagrant.configure(2) do |config| - section):

config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
  vb.customize [
    "modifyvm", :id, "--uartmode1", "file",
    File.join(Dir.pwd, "temp/ubuntu-xenial-16.04-cloudimg-console.log")
  ]
end

This seems to override the current location settings. The temp-folder must already be present.

To completely disable the log file output, follow the recipe from the above link:

config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
  vb.customize [ "modifyvm", :id, "--uartmode1", "disconnected" ]
end