firefox-places

Firefox stores data about browsing history and bookmarks in a Places database. That database is in a file named places.sqlite in the profile¹ folder. The export_firefox_places.py tool queries that SQLite² database and produces a set of output files. It uses the sqlite3³ module in the Python Standard Library to do so.

This command-line tool is not meant to be a general-purpose utility. It serves a specific purpose for the author. Nonetheless, it may also serve as an example for others who want to extract a different set of data from their Places database.

For exploring the Places database, and trying different queries, check out Datasette or the DB Browser for SQLite.

Input

It is probably safer to make a copy of the places.sqlite file, when Firefox is not running, and work with that when running this tool.

Output

The following files are produced:

prefix-bookmarks.csv - A listing of parent_path, title, and url in text/csv format.

prefix-bookmarks.html - A html file with links to each bookmark url.

prefix-frecency.csv - A listing of url, title, and frecency⁴ in text/csv format.

prefix-github-links.html - A html file listing bookmarks where the url points to a GitHub page. This is optional (-g switch).

prefix-history.csv - A listing of url, title, host, visit_count, frecency, and visit_date in text/csv format.

prefix-recent-links.html - A html file listing the "Top 100 Recent/Frequent Links."

Command-Line Usage

usage: export_firefox_data.py [-h] [-p OUTPUT_PREFIX] [-g] places_file

Extracts information from a Firefox places.sqlite file.

positional arguments:
  places_file           Path to the places.sqlite file.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -p OUTPUT_PREFIX, --output-prefix OUTPUT_PREFIX
                        Name of prefix for output files. Default is 'places'.
  -g, --do-github       Include an output file listing bookmarks for github
                        URLs.

Additional

There is also a tool named check_html_output.py in this repository. It was used to verify that the generated HTML files are parsable.

Reference

Footnotes

1. Firefox - Profiles ↩

2. SQLite, SQLite As An Application File Format ↩

3. Python - sqlite3 DB-API 2.0 interface for SQLite databases ↩

4. Firefox - Frecency ↩