dotbot-firefox

Configure your Firefox profile(s) using dotbot.

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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.

Python package

If you want to install dotbot-firefox as a Python package (for example, if you're using a virtual environment), then you can install the plugin using pip:

pip install dotbot-firefox

Then, when running dotbot, use the -p or --plugin option to tell dotbot to load the plugin:

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

If you're using one of dotbot's install scripts, you'll need to edit that file to add the --plugin option.

Git submodule

If you want to track dotbot-firefox as a git submodule (for example, if you manage your dotfiles using git) then you can add the plugin repository as a submodule using git:

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

This will clone the repository to a directory named dotbot-firefox. Then, when running dotbot, use the -p or --plugin option to tell dotbot to load the plugin:

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

Note that you may need to initialize the plugin's git submodule when you clone your dotfiles repository or pull new changes to another computer. The command for this will look something like:

git submodule update --init dotbot-firefox

Copy dotbot_firefox.py

If desired, you can copy dotbot_firefox.py to your dotfiles directory. You might choose to do this if you already use other plugins and have configured dotbot to load all plugins from a plugin directory.

If you copy dotbot_firefox.py to the root of your dotfiles directory then, when running dotbot, use the -p or --plugin option to tell dotbot to load the plugin:

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

If you copy dotbot_firefox.py to a directory containing other plugins, you can use dotbot's --plugin-dir option to load all plugins in the directory. In the example below, the plugin directory is named dotbot-plugins:

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, tox, and scriv
(.venv) $ pip install poetry tox scriv

# Install all dependencies
(.venv) $ poetry install

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