Would you like to harness the power of Kali directly from the command line?

If the answer is yes, this post is for you.

If not, that’s fine too.

Dependencies Link to heading

Building Link to heading

Kali provides this guide to building a Kali virtual machine.

Adding the line vb.gui = false allows the vm to be created without GUI and ran directly in the shell.

Create the Vagrantfile below:

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

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "kalilinux/rolling"

  # Create a public network, which generally matched to bridged network.
  # Bridged networks make the machine appear as another physical device on
  # your network.
  config.vm.network "public_network""

  # Share an additional folder to the guest VM. The first argument is
  # the path on the host to the actual folder. The second argument is
  # the path on the guest to mount the folder. And the optional third
  # argument is a set of non-required options.
  # config.vm.synced_folder "../data", "/vagrant_data"
  # config.vm.synced_folder "/Users/<username>/.ssh", "/home/vagrant/.ssh"

  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
    # Display the VirtualBox GUI when booting the machine
    vb.gui = false
  #
  #   # Customize the amount of memory on the VM:
  #   vb.memory = "1024"
  end
  #
  config.vm.provision "shell", inline: <<-SHELL
    sudo rm /etc/motd
    sudo rm /etc/update-motd.d/*
  SHELL
end

Usage Link to heading

Add these aliases to your ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc for easy control.

Note: Make sure to edit the path to match your Vagrantfile directory location.

# Kali
alias kali-go="cd ~/vagrant-vms/kali/ && vagrant up && vagrant ssh && cd -"
alias kali-up="cd ~/vagrant-vms/kali/ && vagrant up && cd -"
alias kali-ssh="cd ~/vagrant-vms/kali/ && vagrant ssh && cd -"
alias kali-reload="cd ~/vagrant-vms/kali/ && vagrant reload && cd -"
alias kali-provision="cd ~/vagrant-vms/kali/ && vagrant provision && cd -"
alias kali-halt="cd ~/vagrant-vms/kali/ && vagrant halt && cd -"
alias kali-destroy="cd ~/vagrant-vms/kali/ && vagrant destroy -f && cd -"

Notes Link to heading

If you want to use the ssh keys from your host machine, uncomment the config.vm.synced_folder line and replace <username> with your username/home directory.

You will be asked when building or reloading the vm which network you’d like to bridge to.

If you have network issues, use ifconfig to to see the network intefaces and try pinging each one. Then try pinging google.com and 8.8.8.8. If you’re only unable to ping google.com, its a DNS issue that can be resolved by updating the nameservers in /etc/resolv.conf with 8.8.8.8 and restarting the networking service with sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart.