Run-Your-Own Firefox Sync Server

This is an all-in-one package for running a self-hosted Firefox Sync server. It bundles the "tokenserver" project for authentication and the "syncstorage" project for storage, to produce a single stand-alone webapp.

Complete installation instructions are available at:

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

Quickstart

The Sync Server software runs using python 2.7, and the build process requires make and virtualenv. You will need to have the following packages (or similar, depending on your operating system) installed:

• python2.7
• python2.7-dev
• python-virtualenv
• gcc and g++
• make

Take a checkout of this repository, then run "make build" to pull in the necessary python package dependencies:

$ git clone https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver
$ cd syncserver
$ make build

To sanity-check that things got installed correctly, do the following:

$ make test

Now you can run the server:

$ make serve

This should start a server on http://localhost:5000/.

Now go into Firefox's about:config page, search for a setting named "tokenServerURI", and change it to point to your server:

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

(Prior to Firefox 42, the TokenServer preference name for Firefox Desktop was "services.sync.tokenServerURI". While the old preference name will work in Firefox 42 and later, the new preference is recommended as the old preference name will be reset when the user signs out from Sync causing potential confusion.)

Firefox should now sync against your local server rather than the default Mozilla-hosted servers.

For more details on setting up a stable deployment, see:

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

Customization

All customization of the server can be done by editing the file "syncserver.ini", which contains lots of comments to help you on your way. Things you might like to change include:

• The client-visible hostname for your server. Edit the "public_url" key under the [syncstorage] section.
• The database in which to store sync data. Edit the "sqluri" setting under the [syncstorage] section.

Database Backend Modules

If your python installation doesn't provide the "sqlite" module by default, you may need to install it as a separate package:

$ ./local/bin/pip install pysqlite2

Similarly, if you want to use a different database backend you will need to install an appropriate python module, e.g:

$ ./local/bin/pip install PyMySQL
$ ./local/bin/pip install psycopg2

Runner under Docker

There is experimental support for running the server inside a Docker container. Build the image like this:

$ docker build -t syncserver:latest .

Then you can run the server by passing in configuration options as environmet variables, like this:

$ docker run --rm \
    -p 5000:5000 \
    -e SYNCSERVER_PUBLIC_URL=http://localhost:5000 \
    -e SYNCSERVER_SECRET=5up3rS3kr1t \
    -e SYNCSERVER_SQLURI=sqlite:////tmp/syncserver.db \
    -e SYNCSERVER_BATCH_UPLOAD_ENABLED=true \
    -e SYNCSERVER_FORCE_WSGI_ENVIRON=false \
    -e PORT=5000 \
    syncserver:latest

And you can test whether it's running correctly by using the builtin function test suite, like so:

$ /usr/local/bin/python -m syncstorage.tests.functional.test_storage \
    --use-token-server http://localhost:5000/token/1.0/sync/1.5

Removing Mozilla-hosted data

If you have previously uploaded Firefox Sync data to the Mozilla-hosted storage service and would like to remove it, you can use the following script to do so:

$ pip install PyFxA
$ python ./bin/delete_user_data.py user@example.com

Questions, Feedback

• IRC channel: #sync. See http://irc.mozilla.org/
• Mailing list: https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/services-dev