title: Symbolic links and synced folders in Vagrant
body: <p>I want to use Vagrant to provide a common development environment to my team. The hosts are completely different:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Some use OS X, some Linux, and some Windows.</li>
  <li>Some use VMware, some use VirtualBox.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Inside of the VM we want to run Linux.</p>
  
  <p>So far, everything is fine.</p>
  
  <p>Now our idea was that each developer shall be able use the IDE of their choice, and hence we have introduced a synced folder that shares the source code between the host and the VM. This basically, works as well … except for symbolic links.</p>
  
  <p>Inside of our source code we actually do have a few symbolic links, which is not a problem within the Linux inside the VM, but on Windows as host this causes problems. The only thing that we can <em>not</em> do is get rid of the symbolic links, so we need another way to deal with this.</p>
  
  <p>So far, we have tried a number of options:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>There is a workaround mentioned in an <a href="https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/713#issuecomment-4416384">issue</a> of Vagrant, unfortunately this is VirtualBox-only and does not help those who run VMware. So far, we haven't found a way of running code in the <em>Vagrantfile</em> depending on the provider used.</li>
  <li>Instead of using a standard shared folder we now have tried using the <a href="http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/synced-folders/rsync.html">rsync</a> type. This works on Windows, but crashes on OS X with a number of errors telling us that the <code>symlink has no referent</code> (one error per symbolic link).</li>
  <li>We thought about <a href="http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/synced-folders/nfs.html">NFS</a>, but that only works if you do not use Windows as host.</li>
  <li>We also though about <a href="http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/synced-folders/smb.html">SMB</a>, but this again only works on Windows as host.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I can not imagine that we are the only or the first persons on this planet to experience problems with multi-platform hosts and symbolic links within the shared folder.</p>
  
  <p>How can you solve this issue, so that we can keep symbolic links, but still use different host operating systems?</p>