Non-interactive installation of vim plugins

[jan-warchol]

I would like to install all vim plugins as part of the dotfiles role. However, vim plugin managers (including vim-plug) all seem to be designed for interactive use - in particular, their output is an incomprehensible mess when viewed not through a tty (for example, I didn't find a way to disable color codes).

I tried doing something like this, but Ansible didn't manage to parse the output correctly and task status was reported wrongly:

- name: install vim plugins defined in .vimrc
  shell: vim +PlugInstall +qall
  register: vim_plug_output
  changed_when: "'Installing' in vim_plug_output"

[jan-warchol]

There is another problem: if my .vimrc uses a colorscheme that comes from a plugin, vim throws errors when I run it for the first time (because the plugins are not installed yet, so the colorscheme is not available). Worst of all, it asks me to confirm whether I want to continue, which means that non-interactive ansible task will hang on that.

[jwalton3141]

changed_when: "'Installing' in vim_plug_output" won't work as "Installing" is shown for all Plugins (regardless of whether they've already been installed).

However, the following seems to behave as desired:

- name: Install vim plugins
  shell: vim '+PlugInstall --sync' +qall
  register: vim_plug_output
  changed_when: "'Resolving deltas' in vim_plug_output.stdout"

[jwalton3141]

re. the colorscheme issue: yep, agreed. I experienced this exact problem also.

My solution was to install the desired colours manually, before installing the vim plugins. I settled on something like:

- name: Ensure destination exists for vim colours
  file:
    dest: $HOME/.vim/colors
    state: directory

- name: Install snazzy colours for vim
  get_url:
    url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/connorholyday/vim-snazzy/master/colors/snazzy.vim
    dest: $HOME/.vim/colors

- name: Copy vimrc to $HOME
  copy:
    src: vimrc
    dest: $HOME/.vimrc

- name: Install vim plugins
  shell: vim '+PlugInstall --sync' +qall
  register: vim_plug_output
  changed_when: "'Resolving deltas' in vim_plug_output.stdout"