Ubuntu – Changing gsettings for another user from an ansible script (started by vagrant)

gsettingssudounity

I asked the question already on stackoverflow, but figured, that this could be a better place to get an answer: I want to provision a virtual machine with Ubuntu 16 LTS using vagrant and ansible (local). Part of the provisioning is to add and remove some Unity launcher icons for a user that is also created by the same script. The script is started from the vagrant user. After searching through several related questions, I tried variations of

dbus-launch --exit-with-session before the gsettings command
become_flags: '-i'
become_flags: '-H'
become_flags: '-E'

on the following basic ansible command

- name: Remove Launcher Icons
  command: gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Launcher favorites "['application://org.gnome.Nautilus.desktop', 'application://firefox.desktop', 'application://gnome-terminal.desktop', 'application://atom.desktop', 'application://unity-control-center.desktop', 'unity://running-apps', 'unity://expo-icon', 'unity://devices']"
  become: true
  become_user: "{{ user }}"

So far, no success, BUT running the command as a logged in user works.

EDIT
My best appoach for a solution would be launching a shell script from ansible instead of doing the change in ansible directly. However, I am not sure how it should look like.

Best Answer

I recommend you place a .desktop file into each user's ~/.config/autostart folder that will call launcher setup script. Alternatively, place .desktop file into /etc/xdg/autostart so that script runs for every user, but then you'll need to grab username and find user launcher config in some form of database. Id personally use Python script that reads json file with username: launcher list valies, because it's simple.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Unity not working after upgrade Ubuntu 13.04 to 14.04

Try a clean install:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get remove unity unity-2d unity-2d-panel unity-2d-spread unity-asset-pool unity-services unity-lens-files unity-lens-music unity-lens-applications gir1.2-unity-5.0 unity-common indicator-sound indicator-power indicator-appmenu libindicator7 indicator-application indicator-datetime indicator-messages libnux-2.0-0 nux-tools libunity-misc4 unity-2d-common

sudo apt-get autoremove

sudo apt-get autoclean

sudo apt-get install unity unity-2d unity-2d-panel unity-2d-spread unity-asset-pool unity-services unity-lens-files unity-lens-music unity-lens-applications gir1.2-unity-5.0 unity-common indicator-sound indicator-power indicator-appmenu libindicator7 indicator-application indicator-datetime indicator-messages libnux-2.0-0 nux-tools libunity-misc4 unity-2d-common

sudo apt-get upgrade

I was able to fix a similar issue in the past like this.

Ubuntu – Automate unity launcher icon ordering

Introduction

The simple script bellow allows taking a file as argument and sets the launcher to have whatever shortcuts to programs appear in the file (one per line).

Basic idea is that the launcher icons are actually links to .desktop files (wherever they may appear) , and canonical method to set the launcher items is to run the following command:

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Launcher favorites  "[ 'item1.desktop' , 'item2.desktop' , . . . 'item3.desktop;  ]"

This can get tedious if you want to add many items and quoting can become a pain. One can always open a desired program and right click on the icon to invoke the "Lock to launcher" option, but that also is not practical when you're dealing with large amount of items.

The approach taken here is to simply read a file, with 1 time per line, build up the command text , and execute it. This is no different from running the gsettings set command above, except that the hard work is done for you.

Usage:

To run the script , save it to a file, make it executable with chmod +x /path/to/script and run as

python /path/to/script /path/to/file

The input file should contain full path to the items you want added to the launcher, such as /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop , but it's not necessary , a line with firefox.desktop is OK too.

Demo

Before running the script

After running the script

Note that the order is exactly the same as the entries appear in the input file

Script Source

#!/usr/bin/env python
# Author: Serg Kolo
# Date: April 22, 2016
# Purpose:  programmatically set Unity launcher items
# by reading a file
# Written for: http://askubuntu.com/q/760895/295286
# Tested on: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
import sys
import subprocess

command="""gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Launcher favorites """

def run_command(cmd):
    p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    output = p.stdout.read().strip()
    return output  


items=""
with open(sys.argv[1]) as file:
  for line in file:
      temp = "'" + line.strip().split('/')[-1] + "'"
      items = ",".join([items,temp])

items = '"[ ' + items[1:] + ' ]"'

print run_command(command + " " + items)