Ansible-Based Setup for Zsh (Powerlevel10k), Neovim, and Tmux

Tested on Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 24.04

This Ansible configuration automates the setup of a modern development environment consisting of Zsh (with Powerlevel10k), Neovim, and Tmux. It is designed to work on both Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 24.04, and assumes a local, non-root user environment for everything except the initial installation of Ansible and Zsh.

To begin, you must install Ansible and Zsh using the following command:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install ansible zsh make gcc build-essential unzip zip tar curl wget fontconfig -y

Create the following directory

mkdir -p ~/.config

Once installed, clone the Ansible playbook repository or prepare your own playbook.yml. The playbook is executed locally with:

ansible-playbook local.ym

The playbook will install Neovim, Tmux, and the required plugins (like packer.nvim for Neovim) in the user's home directory without requiring further use of sudo. It also installs Oh My Zsh and configures the Powerlevel10k theme to provide a powerful and visually appealing shell experience.

To make Zsh the default shell, the playbook includes the command:

chsh -s $(which zsh)

This change takes effect after restarting your terminal or logging out and back in.

All configurations are placed in user-level directories such as ~/.config, ~/.zshrc, and ~/.tmux.conf, ensuring the setup works even in environments where root access is restricted. This approach makes the setup ideal for personal machines, virtual environments, or shared systems.

Explanation of the Command to Add and Configure a User

The following Linux shell command is used to create a new user and assign them to the same secondary groups as an existing user:

sudo adduser norlando && sudo usermod -aG $(id -nG dvdk | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -v '^dvdk$' | paste -sd, -) norlando

This command performs two main actions in sequence. First, it creates a new user named norlando. This is accomplished using the adduser command, which is a user-friendly interactive utility for adding users on Debian-based systems such as Ubuntu. When this command is executed with sudo, it prompts for the new user's password and some optional user details, such as full name and contact information.

The && operator between the two commands ensures that the second part will only run if the first command—creating the user—completes successfully. This is a common practice to prevent the execution of subsequent commands when an earlier critical step fails.

The second part of the command adds the new user (norlando) to a set of groups that are determined dynamically. Specifically, it examines the groups to which an existing user (dvdk) belongs. Using id -nG dvdk, the command retrieves a space-separated list of all groups that dvdk is a member of. This list includes both the primary group (usually named after the user) and any secondary groups.

To refine this list, tr ' ' '\n' is used to convert the space-separated output into a newline-separated list, making it easier to process with grep. The grep -v '^dvdk$' command filters out the primary group dvdk from the list, as it is typically a private group that should not be shared with other users. What remains is a clean list of secondary groups.

Finally, paste -sd, - joins this newline-separated list into a single comma-separated string, which is the format expected by the usermod -aG command. The -aG flags tell usermod to append (-a) the user to the specified supplementary groups (-G) without removing them from existing ones.

Fedora

Install the following packages

$ sudo dnf install ansible curl wget unzip tar zsh
$ sudo dnf install gcc g++ make