Ansible Role: joplin

This is an Ansible role to install the Joplin open source note taking and to-do application with synchronization capabilities.

This happens to be what I am currently using in an effort to replace Evernote. I am syncing via a Nextcloud instance hosted freely at hostiso

Overview

At a very high level, this role will:

• I have attempted to Ansiblize the developer's installation/update script and it is working sufficiently at this point to "install" the AppImage
• [optional] if settings are provided, the CLI version will be installed and used to create a database, which will be configured via the command line and then copied to the desktop directory...seems to work

This role is currently passing my pretty rudimentary tests for the following operating systems:

• centos7
• fedora27
• fedora28
• fedora29
• ubuntu16
• ubuntu18
• debian8
• debian9

The testing of this role is very specific to the role I've set up in molecule, but I think I'm ok with that.

Important Notes

• because of the way that AppImage's are designed, it cannot be done system-wide and instead needs to go into a user's home directory, so a user and username MUST be specified or nothing happens
• I put some effort into finding the type of desktop so I could send it in the command like: XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP={{ desktop.stdout }} /tmp/Joplin_install_and_update.sh but it is just not worth the effort. Instead, I just blindly put a file in ~/.local/share/applications and if your desktop uses it, GREAT!
• I do ZERO checking of settings if passed. I found the best way to determine what settings were set was to configure Joplin as I wanted it, then to do a silly command to find out what was set how: sqlite3 ~/.config/joplin-desktop/database.sqlite .dump | grep '^INSERT INTO settings' UPDATE: check out the terminal config page
• testing the configuration in a container might not be possible: https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/wiki/FUSE

Requirements

Any package or additional repository requirements will be addressed in the role.

Role Variables

All of these variables should be considered optional however, be aware that sanity checking is minimal (if at all). Also, if a user is not passed, nothing will be done:

• users an AppImage is used per user, and this nested list of users allows for the specification of numerous users
  • username
    • this is the username on the OS NOTE: this role will not create the user!
  • settings
    • this is a list of settings with key/value pairs. I really do not know the best way to determine what is a valid key or value so no sanity checking is done. This is because it is simply put into a "settings" table in a sqlite database in the users's home directory please see example

Example Playbook

Playbook with various options specified:

- hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  roles:
    - role: ansible-role-joplin
      users:
        - username: test_usr1
          settings:
            - { key: "sidebarVisibility", val: "1" }
            - { key: "dateFormat", val: "YYYY-MM-DD" }
            - { key: "sync.target", val: "5" }

Inclusion

I envision this role being included in a larger project through the use of a requirements.yml file. So here is an example of what you would need in your file:

# get the joplin role from github
- src: https://github.com/thisdwhitley/ansible-role-joplin.git
  scm: git
  name: joplin

Have the above in a requirements.yml file for your project would then allow you to "install" it (prior to use in some sort of setup script?) with:

ansible-galaxy install -p ./roles -r requirements.yml

Testing

Testing is not working as well as I'd like at this point.

I am relying heavily on the work by Jeff Geerling in using molecule for testing this role. I have, however, modified the tests to make them specific to what I am attempting to accomplish but this could still use some work.

Please review those files, but here is a list of OSes currently being tested (using geerlingguy's container images):

• centos7
• fedora27
• fedora28
• fedora29
• ubuntu16
• ubuntu18
• debian8
• debian9

To-do

• figure out an appropriate test. Using AppImages does not work in containers because of FUSE

References

• How I test Ansible configuration on 7 different OSes with Docker

License

All parts of this project are made available under the terms of the MIT License.