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Deploying uBlock Origin

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Saitama edited this page Jun 27, 2018 · 41 revisions

I do not know much about that administrator stuff, so I will let a knowledgeable person guide you:

Customizing the settings

Administrators can force specific configurations to deployed uBlock Origin ("uBO"). At launch time, uBO will look for a setting named adminSettings, and if it exists, it will parse, extract and overwrite a user's settings with the administrator-assigned ones.

For Firefox, refer to this specific comment - https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/2986#issuecomment-364035002

For Firefox-legacy, the adminSettings entry must be added to about:config, the key name is extensions.ublock0.adminSettings, and the value is a plain string -- which must be JSON-parseable.

For Chrome, adminSettings must be an entry part of the policy for the extension. See http://www.chromium.org/administrators/configuring-policy-for-extensions.

This is still a work in progress, there are limitations. For example, it is not possible to merge an admin's settings with the user's ones -- a setting can only be overwritten. Hopefully I will address this limitation eventually, as time permit. (See https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/832#issuecomment-248138558).

The content of adminSettings is pretty straightforward: configure uBO as you wish for your users, then create a backup using the "Backup to file" in the Settings pane. Now open this backup file using a text editor, and remove all entries you do not want to overwrite, while taking care to end up with a valid JSON file (mind trailing commas, etc.). All the entries left are the ones which will be overwritten on the user's side.

An example, I created a backup file after having customized uBO, and removed everything except for the "Color-blind friendly" setting, to force that setting to be set on the user's side. Resulting text file:

{
  "userSettings": {
    "colorBlindFriendly": true
  }
}

Now, the value for adminSettings must itself be a plain string, and this means we need to encode the above text into a string, using JSON.stringify. Here is a small utility to help you deal with this step: http://raymondhill.net/ublock/adminSetting.html.

Further readings

Here are issues related to the customization of settings for deployed uBO, there might be advises in there which you may find useful:

uBlock Origin - An efficient blocker for Chromium and Firefox. Fast and lean.

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