I use around 10 browser profiles, each of which has its own set of bookmarks, plugins, self-enforced rules, etc. I want to synchronise browsing history, bookmarks, plugins using a single account. They are managed with a dedicated Firefox account, but I was wondering if I can self host accounts so that I can synchronise stuff over my VPN, and I don’t have to do mail verification every time I create a new profile. But I can’t find much on how online.

I know syncserver-rs but that is not enough. The accounts are still registered with Mozilla’s server.

  • Jeena@piefed.jeena.netEnglish
    2·
    8 hours ago

    Yes I did for many many years. There are two parts of it, one is the accounts themselves like the identity and the other part is the part which syncs the objects. I don’t host the account myself, I just use mozillas account server, because I don’t see much benefit for me and it’s quite complicated to do.

    Bach then I wrote a long article about how to do it with the old python version: https://jeena.net/firefox-sync-15 but that version is obsolete because it was written in Python 2.x which had it’s end of life a coupple of years ago.

    Now there is the rust version. The problem is that the rust version is even more complicated to set up. Therefor I created a docker-compose so people could do it in a easy way, and it collected quite many github-stars: https://github.com/jeena/fxsync-docker/

    This is the one which I am still using, but it’s also a older version from last year. It uses the docker images Mozilla releases. There is a problem https://github.com/jeena/fxsync-docker/issues/3 with the newer version and configuring it to run with your own MariaDB instance instead of google-spanner which Mozilla uses.

    To fix this a guy took inspiration from my git-repo and did a lot of work building his own docker images with the configuration changed so it uses MariaDB instead of spanner: https://github.com/porelli/firefox-sync

    Sadly I didn’t have time yet to check out his version, but it looks very promising.