My Ansible Playbooks

Distro-hopping can be a pain when you expect to have your favorite tools on a new distribution, but don't. These playbooks are an attempt to remedy that situation.

They add packages commonly used (by me), across different flavors of Linux.

The star of the show is packages.yaml, which invokes two different task lists using include_tasks depending on the OS of the node:

---
- hosts: localhost
  become: yes
  tasks:
    - name: Red Hat
      include_tasks: redhat.yaml
      when: ansible_facts['os_family'] == "RedHat"
    - name: Ubuntu
      include_tasks: debian.yaml
      when: ansible_facts['os_family'] == "Debian"

debian.yaml is pretty straightforward, but redhat.yaml has some interesting block and when statements.

For example, on Red Hat systems in order for snapd to work you have to manually create a symlink. The syntax of this playbook ensures that Red Hat systems create this symlink in an idempotent manner.

- name: Install snapd
  block:
    - name: snapd
      dnf: name=snapd state=latest
    # On Red Hat systems, `snapd` requires a link to be manually created
    - name: Create link for snapd to work
      file: src=/var/lib/snapd/snap dest=/snap state=link

Also the following ensures that GNOME Tweaks is installed, but only on GNOME desktops (based on the value of the DESKTOP_SESSION environment variable):

- name: GNOME tools
  when: lookup('env','DESKTOP_SESSION') == "gnome"
  dnf: name=gnome-tweak-tool state=latest

Management of dotfiles is always a topic for lxers, so I've incorporated some of my essential vimrc settings as well. These settings take effect on /root/.vimrc, so any user account's vimrc will be able to adopt these settings simply by symlinking to the file or specifying it on invocation with -u: vim -u /root/.vimrc.

- name: Setting line numbers
  block:
    - name: Line number
      lineinfile: path=/root/.vimrc create=yes line='set number'
    - name: Relative line numbers
      lineinfile: path=/root/.vimrc create=yes line='set relativenumber'

I'm also playing with the possibility of cloning vim plugins to /root/.vim using the git module, but I'm not sure my implementation is quite idempotent enough yet. Without the update key, if the plugin is already installed the playbook fails...

- name: 'Install vim plugin: nerdtree'
  git:
    repo: https://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree
    dest: /root/.vim/pack/a/start
    update: no