Mounting VirtualBox shared folders on an Ubuntu guest

Initial Steps

Open VirtualBox

Right-click your VM, then click Settings

Add an optical drive as Secondary Slave, left empty

Go to Shared Folders section

Add a new shared folder

On Add Share prompt, select the Folder Path in your host that you want to be accessible inside your VM. Type projects for the Folder Name. Make sure that Read-only and Auto-mount are unchecked and Mount point is blank. Then click OK.

Start your VM

Boot and wait a few minutes for all the /latest/meta-data/instance-id pings to timeout

Once your VM is up and running, go to Devices -> Insert Guest Additions CD image

• Use the following command to mount the CD

sudo mkdir /media/cdrom
sudo mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom

• Install dependencies for VirtualBox guest additions

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

• Run the installation script for the guest additions. Wait until the installation completes.

sudo /media/cdrom/./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

• Reboot VM

sudo shutdown -r now

• Create projects directory in your home

mkdir -p /media/projects

• Mount the shared projects folder from the host

sudo mount -t vboxsf projects /media/projects

• The host folder should now be accessible inside the VM.

ls -l /media/projects

 

Make the mount folder persistent

This directory mount we just made is temporary and it will disappear on next reboot. To make this permanent, we’ll set it so that it will mount our ~/shared directory on system startup

• Edit fstab file in /etc directory

sudo nano /etc/fstab

• Add the following to fstab

projects /media/projects vboxsf defaults 0 0

• Edit modules

sudo nano /etc/modules

• Add the following line to /etc/modules and save

vboxsf

• Reboot the VM and log-in again

sudo shutdown -r now

Go to your home directory and check to see if the directory is highlighted in green.