I received some demands to translate in French the article I made about hosting Firefox bookmarks with Syncserver. You can find here the French version of this article.

Contrary to what was written, syncserver also hosts preferences, passwords, tabs, bookmarks (of course), addons, forms and history.

Introduction

In order to be more and more independent about my digital ecosystem. I decided to manage my bookmarks by myself. I use the browser Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla allows you to manage your own synchronization server. Syncserver stores only bookmarks, it didn't manage your Firefox account or the authentication mechanism. This could be done in installing Firefox Accounts Server but it is not the purpose of this tutorial.

It was pretty annoying to deploy it because there aren't a lot of information available and it requires to me to do some basic stuff by myself. It took me something like 10 or 15 hours to make this article. By the way, it works now and you can read this tutorial and I hope you will find it useful :)

The Github repository isn't very active, one release in 2017 and 2016, two release in 2015 and 2014. Just add the Github repository to your RSS agregator to get news about update. If we trust the past, it shouldn't be done very often.

Configure the Firefox Synchronization Server

Dependencies

Basic configuration

The server is configured using an .ini file to specify various runtime settings. The file “syncserver.ini” is this file for the application. There is some setting that you must specify before building the application. Feel free to adjust the [server:main] part to your configuration. You can find the final syncserver.ini file here (some adjustment still required).

The parameter public_url. You should modify it in order to match the interface where syncserver will be accessed by. Even if you run it inside a container or a virtual machine, you have to setup the public url.

public_url = https://example.com

The parameter sqluri. I choose to use a Sqlite database to store bookmarks because it is easy to backup. Feel free to use the one you want and modify the syncserver.ini. If you don't specify a Sql database, your bookmarks will be store in RAM and be reset each time you restart the server.Replace sqluri = sqlite:////tmp/syncserver.db by :

The parameter secret. It is better to generate a secret key for signing authentication tokens. If you don't, the server will generate it each time it start. That could mean a weak key if the random generator seed isn't good enough. Uncomment the parameter and set the value with the result of the next command:

The parameter allowed_issuers. If you are using the account system offered by Mozilla Firefox, you may want to restrict access to just that domain like so:

Don't forget to set it to false after the first successful synchronization or everybody will be able to use your syncserver as bookmarks server.

The parameter force_wsgi_environ. I setup the server behind an Apache2 reverse proxy. I make some try with false but it didn't work. I even open an issue in the official Github repository. The only to make it works was to set the force_wsgi_environ to true.

Build

Don't skip the configuration step or your syncserver will not work as expected. As you build the application, you should configure syncserver.ini BEFORE build the application. If you don't, the modifications did to syncserver.ini will not be read.

chown -R firefox:firefox /opt/syncserver
cd /opt/syncserver
sudo -H -u firefox make build
sudo -H -u firefox make test

After that, if you run sudo -u firefox make serve, you should be able to see some lines about syncserver listening. It could tell you if something go wrong.

Update

After building the application, you could now see two new folder : syncserver.egg-info and local. You should delete them to be able to build the server again, for example for an update.

rm -r syncserver.egg-info
rm -r local

Apache2 virtualhost

I create a classic reverse proxy Apache2 virtual host. It just redirects flux to the virtual machine interface. You can find the script here.

Configure your browser

The procedure varies a little between desktop and mobile Firefox, and may not work on older versions of the browser. I will only describe the process for desktop version of firefox. Feel free to find more informations here

• Enter “about:config” in the URL bar picture.

  

  You should display this warranty screen, confirm your choice to continue.

  

• Made a research for “identity.sync.tokenserver.uri” as name. Double click on the line and replace the string by your public URL.

  

  The syntax should be like this https://example.com/token/1.0/sync/1.5.The current version is 1.7 but the endpoint didn't change ... * the original one is the one display in the previous picture https://token.services.mozilla.com/1.0/sync/1.5

• Restart Firefox for the change to take effect.

Note that this must be set prior to loading the sign-up or sign-in page in order to take effect, and its effects are reset on sign-out.

Hardening and clean up

Lock the instance for your own usage

As you can see, you now use your own server to store your bookmarks. To avoid someone else could do that, you have to set the parameter allow_new_users to false in syncserver.ini and build the application again.

vim syncserver.ini
rm -r syncserver.egg-info
rm -r local
sudo -u firefox make build

Systemd script

Astonishingly, there is no Systemd script provides by the official tutorial. You could find the one I created here. You have to put it in /etc/systemd/system/ and execute systemctl daemon-reload then systemctl enable syncserver.service. It will start syncserver at each boot.

Cleanup

If you install make and g++ just for building this application, feel free to remove them.

apt purge make g++

Of course, setup the firewall in the correct way.

Sources

• Official wiki page about sync server
• Wiki page about the new version of sync server
• Official Github repository
• Arch linux wiki page about Firefox SyncServer
• Issue I created about an issue I met

Social media

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