Automated

danger

This is just experimental feature, it is not tested thoroughly, use at your own risk (with some feedback if you do, please)

This is an initial automation for setting up Windows, which includes the steps from Windows manual setup and some more things, like installing software I commonly use.

prepare-windows.ps1

Download this repository somewhere on Windows.

There is a script prepare-windows.ps1, which will:

• Install WSL with Ubuntu 22.04.
• Enable WinRM protocol with CredSSP authentication transport (to be able to run Ansible from WSL2 to configure Windows)
• Install Chocolatey package manager to install software

It must be run as Administrator from cmd or powershell.

prepare-ubuntu.sh

After prepare-windows.ps1 is run, login to Ubuntu WSL and also download this repo.

Before running below script, ensure your WSL distro is using systemd. See Requirements

From Ubuntu, in repo root, run sudo ./prepare-ubuntu.sh - this will update the system and install required Ansible packages.

setup-windows.yml

This is the main playbook to setup Windows.

1. Create ansible/vars/overrides.yml and set win_username to your windows User. See ansible/vars/README.md for example
2. Investigate ansible/roles/windows/tasks/main.yml and review all other tasks in that directory to see what would be done
   1. common.yml will install common software packages, like 7Zip, Firefox, BitWarden etc.
   2. dev.yml will install GIT, Windows Terminal, IntelliJ, VSCode, Docker Desktop, Postman
   3. context_menu.yml will clean up context menu from things added by some of the packages above
   4. terminal.yml will install FiraCode font and apply custom settings for Windows Terminal
   5. entertainment.yml will install additional software, like Spotify, VLC, Discord etc.

You can switch off the whole sections from #2 by adding to vars/overrides.yml (change true to false to exclude):

bundle_include:
  common: true
  dev: true
  terminal: true
  entertainment: true
  context_menu: true

tip

Instead of excluding whole section, you can also modify its task directly (e.g ansible/roles/windows/tasks/entertainment.yml) and just comment out/remove particular things you don't want to be installed

After everything is prepared, you can run (from ansible/ dir):

ansible-playbook -i inventory.yml setup-windows.yml -k

It will prompt for your Windows password. If the terminal hangs during an execution for more than couple minutes, just break it (<C-c>) and run again. This is because Chocolatey installations from WSL Ansible can get clogged up sometimes (not sure why this happens).