Ansible Role Gnome Extensions

An Ansible role for idempotently managing Gnome extensions.

For the moment, only supports downloading, enabling, disabling, and removing Gnome extensions that are available from https://extensions.gnome.org, as well as enabling and disabling Gnome extensions that have been installed via Apt.

Future plans include adding support for downloading via git.

Requirements

For obvious reasons, this role requires a host with a Gnome desktop environment.

In addition, the role currently uses Debian/Ubuntu-specific tools.

Role Variables

Vars

Variable name	Required	Default value	Description
`gnome_extensions_url`	yes	`https://extensions.gnome.org`	The base of the url used to download Gnome extensions.
`gnome_packages`	yes	`[{name: 'gnome-shell', state: 'present'}, {'gnome-shell-extensions', 'present'}]`	The packages required on the target host for the role to function in the first place.

Defaults

Variable name	Required	Default value	Description
`gnome_user`	yes	`n/a`	The user account to use to install extensions and to install extensions for.
`gnome_extensions`	yes	`[]`	A list of items including the url and desired existence/enabled state for each Gnome extension (see below for details).

`gnome_extensions` variable

Each item has variable has three required properties:

Property name	Required	Type	Accepted values
`url`	yes	string	A url suitable for ansible.builtin.get_url
`state`	yes	string	`present` or `absent`
`enabled`	yes	boolean	`True`, `False`, or anything ansible regards as 'truthy'

Dependencies

The role has no special dependencies.

Example Playbook

The following playbook:

downloads the Open Weather and Put Windows extensions and ensures they are installed,
removes the Gnome Screenshot Tool extension after first disabling it,

- name: Manage Gnome extensions.
  hosts: servers
  vars:
    gnome_user: "instance"
    gnome_extensions:
    gnome_user: "instance"
    gnome_extensions:
      - url: "https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/750/openweather/"
        state: "present"
        installed: true
      - url: "https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/39/put-windows/"
        state: "present"
        installed: true
      - url: "https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1112/screenshot-tool/"
        state: "absent"
        installed: false
  tasks:
    - name: "Include ansible-role-gnome-extensions"
      include_role:
        name: "ansible-role-gnome-extensions"

Testing

The role is fully tested in Molecule on Docker and verified with Ansible with two exceptions: enabling and disabling Gnome extensions.

If anybody knows how to get enough of Gnome reproducibly running in Docker so that I can enable these two things to be tested, please let me know!

License

GPL-3.0-only

Acknowledgments

Big thanks to @PeterMosmans et al whose handy Ansible Role: customize-gnome inspired this one.

ctorgalson/ansible-role-gnome-extensions