dotbot-firefox 1.1.0

Table of contents

• What you can do with it

• Installation

• Configuration

• Firefox profile locations

• Development

What you can do with it

When Firefox starts, it will look for a user.js file in your profile directory. If found, the user.js settings will be copied to prefs.js and used.

You can enforce a consistent Firefox configuration across all your profiles by using dotbot-firefox to create symlinks to a custom user.js. The plugin will find Firefox profile directories that contain a prefs.js file and will use dotbot’s builtin Link plugin to create the symlinks.

Installation

There are two ways to install and use the plugin:

1. Install it as a Python package.

2. Add it as a git submodule in your dotfiles repository.

3. Copy dotbot_firefox.py into your dotfiles directory.

pip install dotbot-firefox

dotbot [...] --plugin dotbot_firefox [...]

git submodule add https://github.com/kurtmckee/dotbot-firefox.git

dotbot [...] --plugin dotbot-firefox/dotbot_firefox.py [...]

git submodule update --init dotbot-firefox

dotbot [...] --plugin dotbot_firefox.py [...]

dotbot [...] --plugin-dir dotbot-plugins [...]

Configuration

First, create a user.js file in the dotfiles directory that dotbot manages. For example, it could contain this configuration to set your homepage:

user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "https://dashboard.example");

(MozillaZine maintains an extensive list of Firefox configuration settings.)

Then, add a firefox directive to your dotbot config with a user.js key. The value of the key follows the syntax of the dotbot Link plugin.

# Example 1:
# "user.js" can be specified as a string.
firefox:
  user.js: firefox/user.js


# Example 2:
# "user.js" can have no value, and will be found
# in the same directory as your dotbot config file.
firefox:
  user.js:


# Example 3:
# The extended Link plugin syntax is supported.
firefox:
  user.js:
    path: firefox/user.js
    force: true

Firefox profile locations

The dotbot-firefox plugin is aware of the following default directories:

• %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles (Windows)

• ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles (Mac OS)

• ~/.mozilla/firefox (Linux)

• ~/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla/firefox (Firefox Snap for Linux)

• ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/.mozilla/firefox (Firefox Flatpak for Linux)

Only profile subdirectories that contain a prefs.js file will be considered valid by the plugin.

Development

To set up a development environment, clone the dotbot-firefox plugin’s git repository. Then, follow these steps to create a virtual environment and run the unit tests locally:

# Create the virtual environment
$ python -m venv .venv

# Activate the virtual environment (Linux)
$ . .venv/bin/activate

# Activate the virtual environment (Windows)
$ & .venv/Scripts/Activate.ps1

# Update pip and setuptools, and install wheel
(.venv) $ pip install -U pip setuptools wheel

# Install poetry and tox
(.venv) $ pip install poetry tox

# Install all dependencies
(.venv) $ poetry install

# Run the unit tests locally
(.venv) $ tox