Mozilla's Build Your Own Browser

• http://byob.mozilla.com
• lorchard@mozilla.com

Overview

Build Your Own Browser is a web application that helps people configure and distribute customized versions of Firefox.

Installation

BYOB has a number of moving parts, so installation may be a bit more complex than the usual LAMP stack PHP app.

• Prerequisites

  • MySQL 5.0+
  • PHP 5.3+, with at least the following modules:
    • gearman, curl, gd, mcrypt, mysql, mysqli
  • Gearman 0.7.0
  • An OS X server, at least for the gearman repack worker

• Filesystem

  • Ensure the following directories exist and are writable by the web server:
    • application/cache
    • application/logs
    • downloads
    • workspace
  • For a clustered environment:
    • Unique per web server: application/cache and application/logs
    • Can be on a shared mount: downloads and workspace

• MySQL

  • Create a new database using the current schema:
    • application/config/schema-mysql/current.sql
  • Though current.sql should always contain the latest schema, changes to the DB will appear here:
    • application/config/schema-mysql/changes/

• Recaptcha

  • Visit recaptcha.net to obtain a public / private key pair for the domain where you intend to install the app.

• Application config

  • All editable configuration files reside under application/config
  • Copy config-local.php-dist to config-local.php and edit to make installation-specific changes.
    • The database.local structure should be given the MySQL credentials to access the database created in the previous step.
    • The database.shadow structure should be given the same MySQL credentials as database.local, or configured to point at a read-only replica of database.local.
    • Change the recaptcha settings to reflect the domain, public key, and private key data acquired from recaptcha.net
    • Change the email.* settings to reflect local email environment.
      • Set email.driver to 'native' if PHP itself is setup to send email
      • Set email.driver to 'smtp' and update email.options if an external SMTP server is to be used.
    • Set core.display_errors to FALSE to prevent verbose error messages
    • Set core.log_threshold to 0 to disable logging to application/logs
    • Change core.site_domain to the domain name of the web host, deleting the code to guess the domain name for dev servers.
  • Copy repacks.php-dist to repacks.php and edit to make installation-specific changes.
    • In particular, the locations of the downloads and workspace directories can be changed.

• Create first admin user:

  • At the command line, execute this command from the application directory:
    • php index.php util/createlogin admin someaddress@mozilla.com admin
      • Replace someaddress@mozilla.com with a real email address
    • You should see output like the following:
      • Profile ID 1 created for 'admin' with role 'admin'
      • Password: mnm518x
    • The last line is the temporary password for the admin account - someone should use it and change it immediately.

• Gearman and repack worker

  • Important details:
    • BYOB performs browser customizations asynchronously from the web application by using a gearman job server and a worker process.
    • Although the web application can run on a Linux server, the gearman worker itself must currently run on an OS X server.
      • This is because the browser repack script requires access to OS X utilities in order to build OS X disk images for browser distribution.
  • Configure the addresses of gearman servers:
    • application/config/config-local.php
  • A shell script wrapper that runs the gearman repack worker is here:
    • modules/gearman_events/bin/gearman-worker.sh
    • This shell script repeatedly restarts the PHP worker, which allows the PHP worker to exit occasionally in order to clean up and refresh its code.
    • This shell script should be started up as a daemon when the server boots up, after MySQL, gearman, and apache are all available.