Heavy Profile

.

The project is built in two parts:

• hp-creator a script to create a Firefox "heavy" profile
• hp-archiver a script to create a collection of tar-gzipped files

hp-creator

The tool maintains a local profile using Arsenic & Geckodriver, it visits random pages using a dictionary of words.

To run it, just point the profile directory:

$ hp-creator /tmp/profile --max-urls 10
Updating profile located at '/tmp/profile'
Starting the Fox...
1/10 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.Xbottle.TRS0&_nkw=unit
2/10 https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=child
3/10 https://www.bing.com/search?q=create+list+of+nounsmover
4/10 https://www.bing.com/search?q=create+list+of+nounsraccoon
5/10 https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=cat
6/10 https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fan
7/10 https://www.google.com/search?q=humor
8/10 https://www.bing.com/search?q=create+list+of+nounsscience
9/10 https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=creator
10/10 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.Xbottle.TRS0&_nkw=sewer
Done.

If the profile does not exists, it will generate a new one.

The profile also gets the latest Firefox Nightly and uses it automatically.

hp-archiver

Once the local profile has been created, hp-archiver can generate a ZIP file that can be downloaded by clients.

hp-archiver takes two arguments to run:

• the profile directory
• the archives directory

The archives directory is populated by the script with tar-gzipped archives of the profiles. It contains up to ten 10 versions of the heavy profile, named with this pattern:

• YYYY-MM-DD-hp.tar.gz
• YYYY-MM-DD-hp.tar.gz.sha256 <== checksum
• latest.tar.gz

Where latest.tar.gz is a symbolic link to the latest version.

The archive contains an embedded GPG signature for verifying the origin and authenticity of the profile if needed.

In order to speed up downloads, the tool also produces tar-gzipped diffs so the client can update its local version without having to download the whole archive everytime.

Diff files are using this naming pattern:

• diff-YYYY-MM-DD-YYYY-MM-DD-hp.tar.gz
• diff-YYYY-MM-DD-YYYY-MM-DD-hp.tar.gz.sha256

Where the first date is the oldest version.

The archives directory is published as a browsable HTTP directory.

Example:

$ hp-archiver /tmp/profile /tmp/archives/
Creating 2017-08-31-hp.tar.gz...
=> Adding /tmp/profile/addonStartup.json.lz4...
...
=> Adding /tmp/profile/xulstore.json...
Done.
Creating a diff tarball with the previous day
=> 6183 new files, 255 modified, 5 deleted.
Done.