A script that allows you to create a portable Firefox profile that you can sync anywhere, e.g with Seafile or Owncloud or Dropbox or some app alike, allowing you to remote kill other instances to prevent corruption of the profile.
Why would you do this?
- Have one or more Firefox instance per web project so you can have one or more simulated users, and easily share and document this environment
- Run multiple Firefox instances at the same time (they do not interfere with eachother or the main Firefox process on the system)
- Have a privacy-oriented separate Firefox instance used just for webcommunication and such (ala Rambox, Franz, etc)
This is not a very complicated script and should be understandable to everyone. The core of it is just running /usr/lib/firefox/firefox --profile ./ffprofile --no-remote. You can find it here. The rest is just fluff to prevent corruption and weirdness :)
The locking works as following:
- you start the script on one machine, the script starts firefox and creates a .lock file and stays in the background to check for .kill files
- dropbox/seafile/etc syncs the file to other machines
- you start the script on another machine, the script sees the existing .lock file and asks if you want to create a .kill file, and will create one and wait until the .lock file disappears
- the .kill file is synchronised to other machines
- script on original machine notices the .kill file and kills firefox, and deletes the .lock and .kill file after it exits
- dropbox/seafile/etc syncs to other machines
- script starts up firefox on other machine after sync completes
There's a simpler version of this script available here https://github.com/xarinatan/locker which allows you to run any program through this locking mechanism.