Vagrant – Passing Host’s Current User to Shell Provisioner

To execute a script or a command as a user, you need to combine su -l and bash -i:

 execute "npm_install" do
    command "su vagrant -l -c 'cd /shared-with-host/helperScripts/ && bash -i npm install -g q zombie should mocha coffee-script'" 
    action :run
  end

Because of some bugs, chef does not set properly the environment for the specified user in execute. The narced133's solution will not work.

You can also add this into your Vagrantfile:

ansible.verbose = "vvv"

this would need to go where you're kicking off the provisioning, like this:

config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible|
    ansible.verbose = "vvv"
end

This sets the verbose option of ansible:

-v, --verbose         verbose mode (-vvv for more, -vvvv to enable
                        connection debugging)

Setting this to vvvv (four v's) is useful for debugging SSH connection errors - but it creates a huge amount of debug output, so only use four v's if you're having connection problems.