Firefox Sync Server

This is the backend server allowing you to sync your Firefox tabs, bookmarks, etc between various computers (or your computer and your phone).

Note that this still relies on a Firefox Account Server.

How to Use This

Docker Setup

This container can be used directly. Here is a portion of my personal docker-compose.yaml file:

services:
    # many others...

    ffsync:
        build: ../../build/ffsync
        container_name: ffsync
        restart: "no"
        environment:
            - PUID=${PUID}
            - PGID=${PGID}
            - SYNCSERVER_PUBLIC_URL=http://ffsync.${LOCAL_DOMAIN_NAME}
            - SYNCSERVER_SECRET=Z6OCh20wR2jFnWuGkIvWsp3NAJ6Qc1lB
            - SYNCSERVER_SQLURI=sqlite:////data/syncserver.db
            - SYNCSERVER_BATCH_UPLOAD_ENABLED=true
            - SYNCSERVER_FORCE_WSGI_ENVIRON=false
            - PORT=${FFSYNC_PORT}  # default is 5000
        ports:
            - ${FFSYNC_PORT}:${FFSYNC_PORT}
        volumes:
            - ${DOCKER_USERDIR}/volumes/ffsync:/data

PUID, GUID, DOCKER_USERDIR, LOCAL_DOMAIN_NAME, and FFSYNC_PORT are environmental variables used by service services in my local stack, and are provided by a .env file located in the same directory as my docker-compose.yaml file.

Local Firefox Configuration

From the official documentation:

To configure desktop Firefox to talk to your new Sync server, go to about:config, search for identity.sync.tokenserver.uri and change its value to be the public URL of your server with a path of token/1.0/sync/1.5:

identity.sync.tokenserver.uri: http://localhost:5000/token/1.0/sync/1.5

[...] To configure Android Firefox 44 and later to talk to your new Sync server, just set the identity.sync.tokenserver.uri exactly as above before signing in to Firefox Accounts and Sync on your Android device.

Important: after creating the Android account, changes to identity.sync.tokenserver.uri will be ignored. (If you need to change the URI, delete the Android account using the Settings > Sync > Disconnect... menu item, update the pref[rence], and sign in again.) Non-default TokenServer URLs are displayed in the Settings > Sync panel in Firefox for Android, so you should be able to verify your URL there.

https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run-sync-1.5.html

Why I Created This

or, What Problems is This Trying to Solve?

A Firefox Sync server seemed like a simple and useful thing to run to try my hand at self-hosting.

Personal Additions and Notes

None, really, for now.

Prior Art

This builds on my personal base Python image, updated to run Python 2.7.

This is also based on Mozilla's official Sync Server code.

Known Issues

• It seems to work, in the sense that I can log in on both my desktop and phone, but I can't get it to share tabs between the two; I don't know if that's a problem with Firefox Sync generally, the version of the Sync server I'm running, or something in my local configuration.
• The upstream program is based on Python 2.7, which has a planned end-of-life at the end of 2019. There is some talk about move to Python 3, but that remains a work in progress.
• If you're seriously concerned about the privacy aspects (and that's why you're running your own Sync server), you should probably run your own Firefox Account server as well.