Ansible Role: idolize.dotfiles_stow

Installs a set of dotfiles from a given Git repostiory.

Works for all dotfile repos that follow the stow format (blog post).

Example playbook

---
- hosts: localhost
  roles:
    - role: idolize.dotfiles_stow
      vars:
        dotfiles_repo: https://github.com/myusername/mydotfiles
        dotfiles_conflict_mode: adopt_and_reset

Configuration

Dotfiles Repository

Before using the role, you must define the dotfiles_repo variable somewhere. This is the git repo where your dotfiles are stored (e.g. "https://github.com/myusername/mydotfiles").

You may also specify dotfiles_repo_version (default = "main"), which specifies the version of the repo to checkout (e.g. branch, tag, or commit).

Directories

The dotfiles repository clone location and dotfiles symlink destination can be configured using the following variables:

dotfiles_repo_local_destination (default = "~/dotfiles") - Where to clone the dotfiles_repo git repository (the source stow directory).

dotfiles_home (default = "~") - Where to symlink the final dotfiles (stow's target directory).

Conflicts

If there are already existing configuration files in the dotfiles_home target directory then, by default, the task will throw an error. This matches the default behavior of stow.

If, instead, you want to change the behavior of how conflicts are handled you can set the dotfiles_conflict_mode variable to one of the following options:

abort (default) - Throws an error and exits on conflict.

adopt - Follows the "adopt" behavior from stow, where the existing config files overwrite the ones in the dotfiles repo.

adopt_and_reset - This is semi-equivalent to overwriting the existing config files with the ones from the dotfiles_repo, but there are a few caveats to be aware of. Instead of directly overwriting the files, it instead runs using --adopt, and then resets the dotfiles_repo repo back to the previous state using git.

Dependencies

None

Tests

Fully tested on:

• Fedora 36
• Ubuntu 20.04
• macOS 13.4.1

Credits

Forked from: https://github.com/mariuskimmina/ansible-role-dotfiles

Inspired by: https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-role-dotfiles. The main difference between the original project and this one is the usage of stow.