Ansible Role Vim

An Ansible role to install Vim and plugins on Linux and macOS.

This role uses Vim 8's native package manager (see :help packages), so roles will be installed by default to the following locations:

• ~/.vim/pack/ansible-managed/start
• ~/.vim/pack/ansible-managed/opt

Note that, unlike Pathogen or other Vim plugin managers, Vim's native package management does not automatically create helptags. This role expects to be the package manager (i.e. it expects to be run every time a plugin is added or removed), and so manages helptag creation.

If your use case doesn't involve using the role for all Vim plugin management, you'll need to manage helptags using a method like one of the following:

• run :helptags ALL from inside Vim,
• script it (on cron or another trigger like Git hooks) something like this role does it: vim -c 'helptags ~/.vim/pack' -c q

Requirements

The role has no special requirements, but Vim package management only works with Vim > 8.0, so it's necessary to ensure that a sufficiently recent version of Vim is either present, or will be installed by setting the vim_installed_packages variable appropriately.

Role Variables

The following variables are used in the role. See also Example Playbook (below) and molecule/default/playbook.yml for specific examples.

Variable name	Default value	Description
vim_installed_packages	["vim"]	A list of packages to install (passed to Ansible's Package module).
vim_removed_packages	[]	A list of packages to remove (e.g. on Ubuntu, it might be preferable to remove vim-tiny).
vim_owner	""	The system user to install Vim and/or associated plugins for.
vim_pack_subdirectory	ansible-managed	The name of the directory to place plugins installed by this role into the default creates e.g. ~/.vim/pack/ansible-managed/start and ~/.vim/pack/ansible-managed/opt.
vim_installed_plugins	[]	The list of plugins to install to ~/.vim/pack/ansible-managed/start--see :help packages for details on what this means. Should contain a repo property, a type property set to either 'start' or 'opt', and (optionally) a version property as used by Ansible's Git module.
vim_removed_plugins	[]	A list of plugins to remove from ~/.vim/pack/ansible-managed/{opt,start}. Each should contain a directory property set to the directory name of the plugin, and a type property set to either 'start' or 'opt'.
vim_dotfiles	[]	A list of local vim-related dotfiles to install to ~/.

Example Playbook

---
# Note: all of these plugins--even the ones being removed in the
# example--are awesome plugins that I use every day.
#
- hosts: all
  vars:
    vim_removed_packages:
      - "vim-tiny"
    vim_owner: "molecule"
    vim_installed_plugins:
      - repo: "https://github.com/altercation/vim-colors-solarized.git"
        type: "start"
      - repo: "https://github.com/itchyny/lightline.vim.git"
        type: "start"
      - repo: "https://github.com/scrooloose/nerdcommenter.git"
        type: "start"
      - repo: "https://github.com/skammer/vim-css-color.git"
        type: "start"
      - repo: "https://github.com/vim-vdebug/vdebug.git"
        type: "opt"
      - repo: "https://github.com/godlygeek/tabular.git"
        type: "opt"
    vim_removed_plugins:
      - directory: "nerdcommenter"
        type: "start"
      - directory: "tabular"
        type: "opt"
    vim_dotfiles:
      - "{{ playbook_dir }}/files/dotfiles/.vimrc"
  roles:
    - role: ansible-role-vim

License

GPLv3

Author Information

Christopher Torgalson