Ansible playbook for codam-web-greeter

This Ansible playbook installs codam-web-greeter on a 42 network cluster computer. It is intended to be used by IT staff at 42 schools to install the greeter theme on all cluster computers at once without too much effort.

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How to use

Add the following to the roles in your requirements.yml file in your ansiblecluster repository:

roles:
  - name: codam.webgreeter
    src: git+https://github.com/codam-coding-college/ansible-codam-web-greeter.git
    version: v1.2.1

It is recommended to change the version specified to the latest one from the Releases page. Please note that this version is specific to this playbook and does not necessarily match the version of the codam-web-greeter itself.

Then run the following command to install the role:

ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml

Modify the variables using the vars/all.yml file in your ansiblecluster repository to your liking. The one you most likely want to change is the codam_web_greeter_data_server_url variable to point to your own data server.

Add the role to your site.yml playbook as the last role executed (do not define tags here, this is unneccessary and is a mistake 42 made for all the other roles):

roles:
  ...
  - { role: codam.webgreeter }

Congratulations, the codam-web-greeter will now be installed on your cluster computers when you run the site.yml playbook! You can run it with the tag codam.webgreeter to only run the steps for the codam-web-greeter specifically.

⚠️ Do not run the playbook on all cluster computers at once without testing it first on a testing machine. Your campus setup could potentially break, resulting in students not being able to log in and changes that can not easily be reverted.

Campus logo

Now, the following is optional but recommended: add your campus's logo to the campus_files directory in your ansiblecluster repository. The logo should be named logo.png and be placed in campus_files/usr/share/codam/web-greeter/. It will then get copied to the cluster computer and displayed by the login screen.

However, keep in mind that most campuses feature their logo already in the wallpaper used by the login screen provided by 42/Ubuntu. In this case, the logo would be displayed twice by the login screen. It is recommended to remove the logo from your login screen wallpaper or to use a custom wallpaper without the logo (defined in the login_wallpaper_path variable) to avoid this.

Using this feature over the logo embedded in the wallpaper has the advantage that the logo can be shifted around and resized more easily when required by the login screen's user interface.

It is also possible to specify a default user image in case the user's ~/.face file is not present in their home folder. This image should be named user.png and be placed in the same directory as the logo. The default 42 user image can be found here. If no default user image is present on the system, no image will be displayed on the lock screen at all and it will just display the student's name.

Variables

Variable	Description	Default value
nody_greeter_version	The version of the nody-greeter to install from GitHub.	1.6.2
codam_web_greeter_git_repo	The repository to download codam-web-greeter from.	https://github.com/codam-coding-college/codam-web-greeter
codam_web_greeter_version	The version of codam-web-greeter to download (use a tag or a branch name from the git repo).	v1.1.0
codam_web_greeter_data_server_url	The URL to the data server to download the greeter data from. Hostname is appended to the url, so make sure it ends with a slash.	https://clusterdata.codam.nl/api/config/
dbus_cache_group_check_enabled	Whether to check if a user is in a specific ldap group before adding it to the dbus cache. Usually this is not required.	false
dbus_cache_group_check_group	The group to check for.	student
login_wallpaper_path	The path to the login wallpaper to set.	/usr/share/42/login-screen.jpg