dotfiles

An attempt at automating the process of keeping my dotfiles up to date via ansible.

Requirements:

• pip
• ansible

I'm working on making this so that the playbook will install all the dependencies, but as this is ansible, you'll have to at least get this repo (whether you pull it via git or use a local unzipped copy of it) existing somewhere. I've been using ~/.config/${USER}/dotfiles as my local version of it and that seems to work well.

Usage

ansible-playbook install_dotfiles.yml --ask-become-pass

Some tasks require sudo, thus the --ask-become-pass above

Testing

This makes use of vagrant to test out changes, and hopefully make this easier to maintain. Run vagrant up and it should run all the tasks successfully. You can then vagrant ssh into the VM and test out any changes.

To test tasks specific to graphical environments, run vagrant up --no-provision. This will start the normal vagrant box, but without doing any of the ansible provisioning. Then, log into the vagrant box with vagrant ssh and run the following:

# install dnf updates first
sudo dnf -y upgrade
# install pip
sudo dnf -y install python3-pip
# install pip and ansible as user
pip install --user --upgrade pip ansible
# install gnome
sudo dnf -y group install "Basic Desktop" GNOME
# change the default target so that it will start a graphical login screen.
sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target

Note

It will be worthwhile to use Virtual Machine Manager to log into the virtual machine with Gnome once, just so that the directories are set up as a normal graphical environment would be.

The virtual machine should have the dotfiles directory accessible inside the VM at /vagrant, so testing the dotfiles run should now be as simple as (just like normal, even from vagrant ssh):

cd /vagrant
ansible-playbook install_dotfiles.yml

Note

It's likely the case that the resulting virtual machine might not be too useable. It's probably pretty strangled as it's just intended as a minimal virtual machine, but at the very least, you'll be able to test that the tools get installed and that the configurations are all in the correct spots.