Vagrant is a great tool for development environment isolation(well, a more light-weighted and more popular one is Docker nowdays). But recently when I install Vagrant on Windows, I encounter an error saying “rsync not found on your path”.

The possible cause of this is that only MinGW is installed on Windows but Cygwin is not. So rsync as a linux tool is not available. So the solution here is basically installing Cygwin.

• Go to Cygwin homepage and download setup.exe. Follow instructions and install.
• When you are choosing packages to install, search “rsync” and “openssh” since they will be used in working with Vagrant.

But after the above steps, I run vagrant up and still see errors “….[path] is not a file or directory” but the path does indeed exist. So I searched online and found the issue description on GitHub, which is really helpful. Then I went ahead and changed the cygdrive prefix by following the question on stackexchange.

# go to /etc/fstab and add the following line
none / cygdrive binary 0 0
# relaunch cygwin now the path should be correct

References

• blog about “rsync not found on path”
• vagrant GitHub issue
• Question on stackexchange