Personal and administrator shells

The workstation and headless Server profiles select Zsh by default, with Fish as an explicit alternative. This applies to one existing ordinary personal or administrator account. The lychd runtime account retains its separate identity, Bash shell and authority. Root, UIDs below 1000, accounts with false/nologin shells and the runtime UID are refused. The operator must choose the intended ordinary account; a high UID alone does not establish its purpose. No shell framework or third-party plugin is installed.

The shared tumbleweed_shell role installs only the selected distribution shell package and changes that account's login shell. The workstation also uses the selected shell in its named Konsole profile. Existing desktop terminal defaults stay unchanged. The headless shell playbook installs no KDE, fonts, Starship or other workstation packages.

Zsh receives native Tab completion and persistent history with a 10,000-entry save target (Zsh trims after roughly 20% growth), with consecutive duplicates and commands beginning with a space excluded. Its new history lives in ~/.local/state/lychd-shell/history, with a private directory and mode 0600; existing shell histories are neither imported, truncated nor removed by Ansible. Zsh's completion security checks remain enabled and insecure completion directories are ignored. Fish uses its native persistent history, suggestions and completion without replacing config.fish or its history. A leading space is a convenience, not a guarantee that a secret cannot reach another log.

The role writes a reserved Zsh fragment at ~/.config/lychd-shell/zshrc and a minimal ~/.zshrc loader only if no personal startup file exists. A foreign .zshrc is preserved and causes an early refusal unless its owner has deliberately added this exact standalone line:

source "$HOME/.config/lychd-shell/zshrc"

Review the existing startup logic and place the hook where it will execute in an interactive shell, before personal overrides. The playbook recognizes the line without executing personal configuration, and leaves that file's bytes and permissions unchanged. Reserved files bearing this role's marker can be updated; foreign reserved files, symlinks, hard links, unsafe write permissions and changed account identity are refused. Personal home writes run as that user. Custom ZDOTDIR or relocated XDG configuration requires a separate review; this profile uses ordinary home-relative startup paths. Existing personal prompt configuration takes precedence; on workstations the managed Starship configuration is used only when no personal choice exists.

Run and verify

Keep inventory and variables outside the checkout. Workstation runs include this role already; set lychd_shell: fish in the private workstation variables to select Fish. The guarded server.yml/deploy.yml flow includes administrator shell preparation only when that exact host has been authorized for provisioning. Its healthy-running verification branch stays read-only. For shell preparation independent of application deployment, from deployments/ansible run:

ansible-playbook -i /private/inventory.yml playbooks/shell.yml --limit pilot --check --diff
ansible-playbook -i /private/inventory.yml playbooks/shell.yml --limit pilot
ansible-playbook -i /private/inventory.yml playbooks/shell.yml --limit pilot
ansible-playbook -i /private/inventory.yml playbooks/shell-verify.yml --limit pilot

Add -K when sudo needs a password. To select another existing account or Fish, pass -e lychd_shell_user=existing_person -e lychd_shell=fish. Check mode validates destinations and reports package, file, history and login-shell changes without writing. Verification checks packages, configuration, history permissions and the selected shell executable without changing them or executing user startup code. When login-shell selection is enabled, apply and verification also require the executable in /etc/shells, even if the account already names it. Planning can report a missing shell package before its executable is installed. A second unchanged apply should report zero changes.

Keep an existing administrator session and console recovery available until a fresh SSH login works. Verify the actual shell, native completion and history across two fresh interactive sessions; confirm zsh -c 'printf ok' or fish -c 'printf ok' prints only ok. On a workstation, check konsole --profile LychD-Workstation and the prompt/font. Fixture and syntax checks do not replace this live acceptance. Switching between supported shells preserves previous configuration, packages and histories. To retire the role, explicitly restore the chosen account shell, remove only its marked startup files or manually added source line, and retain histories as personal data.

Upstream contracts: Zsh history options, Zsh completion, Fish interactive features, and Fish startup files.