ansible-desktop

Ansible Playbook to configure my laptops and desktops

I care about not having to think too much about my setup between machines. Especially when I want to get right to work.

For that reason, it is very comfortable for me to have the same base configuration on each machine (look, feel, keyboard shortcuts, core software, etc.).

My journey to the current state of this repo

I found a cool bash script on the internet (I didn't understand most of it) 🤷
I modified cool bash script for my needs and it worked! 🚀
I learned about Makefiles. 😄
I proceeded to do everything with Makefiles. 🤩🤩🤩
I got tired of running successive Make targets over and again 😐.
I used Ansible at work and decided to take a course to learn more about it. 🤓
I put off actually taking the plunge to use Ansible. 🕒🕕🕘🕛
I finally took the plunge and decided to use Ansible for my configuration. ✔️

Calendar Versioning

This project adheres to Calendar Versioning, YYYY.MINOR.MICRO.

Supported Ubuntu LTS Versions

I will support the LTS versions I use. There are no plans to support non-LTS versions.

LTS	Last Supported Branch/Tag
Ubuntu 20.04	main
Ubuntu 18.04	2020.1.0

Ansible Galaxy Roles

There is broader LTS and Distribution support in the following roles:

Role	Description
iancleary.jetbrains_mono	installs Jetbrains-Mono font
iancleary.zsh_antibody	Installs Zsh, oh-my-zsh, and the antibody plugin manager

Core Software

This isn't exactly the list of Ansible roles, but below is a list of what the software installs.

Application Base

Flatpak,
Snap,

AppImageLauncher

AppImageLauncher, see the Integrate any AppImage into the Ubuntu Desktop article.

Application Launcher

ULauncher, A ctrl + spacebar productivity bar, Ulauncher is inspired by Alfred for macOS and similar semantic search tools that followed in its wake.

Backups

Timeshift https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift,

Chat Clients

Signal Desktop,
Slack,
Telegram,

Development Tooling

ansible,
docker,
docker-compose,
gh GitHub CLI
nodejs,
python3.8,
yarn

Dotfiles

yadm dotfile manager

Email

HEY Mail, by Basecamp, hey-main snap

File Storage

Tresorit,

Games

Steam,

GNOME Configuration

The GNOME Ansible roles configure my GNOME personal preferences.

Extensions: gnome-extensions
Keybindings: gnome-keybindings
Preferences: gnome-preferences

Integrated Development Environments (IDE)

VSCode,

If you prefer a fully open source option, checkout VSCodium!

Postman for API testing,
kite AI Autocompletion and Docs for Python, runs locally

Music

Spotify,

Notes

cherrytree,
Standard Notes,

System Info

Stacer https://github.com/oguzhaninan/Stacer,

Tasks

TickTick using nativefier,

Terminal

antibody shell plugin manager (concurrent and compiled)
Hyper Terminal, with "pane:splitHorizontal": "ctrl+shift+f", // changed from "ctrl+shift+e" because vercel/hyper #3660
zsh and oh-my-zsh
powerlevel10k theme with needed fonts

Screenshots and GIFs

carbon-cli for beautiful images of my code - right inside my terminal,
Flameshot,

Flameshot keybinding to the Print Screen key using gsettings

Peek animated GIF screen recorder,

Text Editors

Sublime Text,

Utilities

Caffeine,
Breaktimer,
Nordvpn,

Web Browsers

Chromium,
Firefox,

Getting Started with this repo

Makefile

The Makefile is the entry point.

Common Utility Scripts

The scripts folder contains common setup between local scripts and Travis-CI.

Testing

Continuous Integration Testing is done with the .github/workflows/test.yml file.

Multiple jobs test independent portions of the installation.

While testing the playbook in order would be ideal, the preference here is to have the Continuous Integration finish faster.

Linting

Linting is performed on common file types:

YAML files with yamllint
Bash files with shellcheck
Markdown files with markdownlint-cli

New Machine Setup

For a new machine, I run the following command to set up my computer:

Please make sure you adjust your hostname as Ansible keys off this variable. I like to do this during the initial configuration of the machine.

wget -qO- \
https://github.com/iancleary/ansible-desktop/raw/main/run.sh | \
bash

This will prompt you for your sudo password for the bash script and then once later for ansible's "BECOME PASSWORD" prompt.

Voila! 🎉🎉🎉

Requirements_ansible.txt

Notable Ansible Modules Used with regards to dependencies

dconf
This is drives the psutil Python3 requirement
snap
This drives the ansible >=2.8.0 requirement

Changes

See CHANGELOG for history.

Authors

I benefited from the source work of others, see AUTHORS.md.

My choice to open source my work here is to share back with you.