After some trial and errors, the best way (as of this writing) to manage cookbooks for vagrant + chef is to use brekshef. You can forget about knife or librarian-chef.

If you use berkshelf with vagrant, you will need to install the vagrant-berkshelf plugin. The plugin is quite clever and you do not need to specify the cookbook path for your chef-solo or chef-zero provisioner.

However it does not apply to data_bags. You will still need to specify the path to data_bags if you need to use data bag.