Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Self-Hosting a Firefox Sync Server

blog.diego.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 91 posts

Re: Self-Hosting a Firefox Sync Server

#71

Post by AshamedCaptain »

therein wrote: post #5

Would be nice if librewolf and WaterFox changed their flow to make it clear that Mozilla's Sync Server is being used, and make it opt in with something like: To sync please select one of the options below: [x] Custom Sync Server: ___________ [ ] Mozilla Sync

For the record, for a lot of time Firefox Sync used to be exactly like that.

https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2011/03/22/get-syncing-wit...

Not only one of the first questions would be whether you want to use a Custom Sync Server, but this "Custom Sync Server" could be something as trivial as WebDAV server (if you have any kind of public-facing HTTP server, it almost certainly already supports this, or does so with minimal extra dependencies) . Then it would also ask you for the E2EE key, separately from the login key.

Re: Self-Hosting a Firefox Sync Server

#73

Post by spinningD20 »

gudzpoz wrote: post #20

Garuda Linux has been hosting their own Firefox Sync server for a while now for their FireDragon browser [1]: defaultPref("identity.sync.tokenserver.uri", "https://ffsync.garudalinux.org/token/1.0/sync/1.5"); // --> FIREDRAGON CONFIG (They seem to be running the older non-Rust sync server though. [2]) [1] https://firedragon.garudalinux.org/ [2] https://gitlab.com/garuda-linux/infra-nix/-/blob/main/docker...

A little off topic, but I had to refresh my memory as to what Garuda was. As a long time user of arch in various "forms" (initially manjaro until I grew frustrated with all the extra/different things, then antergos because it was mostly just plain arch with a nice installer/sane default packages, then endeavouros because it was the closest thing to what antergos provided me), I'm not sure how I missed garuda. Some of their utilities look convenient.

Thanks for the mention! I'll have to try them again on my next machine.

Re: Self-Hosting a Firefox Sync Server

#75

Post by maxlin »

layer8 wrote: post #55
maxlin wrote: post #50

I've use Firefox as my tertiary browser option, for some specific uses like for example I have it always have an VPN plugin on. But I'm starting to feel anything in its vicinity should be avoided like hostile malware, regardless if an attempt to remove bad parts of it is made. A corporation can do a lot of bad stuff with their software and terms, and most have probably normalized that in their mind. But after now Fir…

Mozilla is changing the wording: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms... There is still cause for criticism, but if you think Mozilla is worse than Google (Chrome) or Microsoft (Edge), then that’s hard to take seriously.

Hard to? Missed the part about Mozilla basically being an advertising company nowadays, and "a global band of activists"?

Something Chrome-adjacent, like Chromium or Brave doesn't have the stain Firefox and everything close to it now has. That is not a position that is hard to maintain.

Firefox has come so far from what it once was. I did once cheer for it, but it simply has become its own worst enemy. Almost nothing is left, crazy to think they're the only competing browser engine independent from the chromelikes.

Re: Self-Hosting a Firefox Sync Server

#76

Post by JetSpiegel »

gsliepen wrote: post #37

Congrats on getting this self-hosted. However, the solution looks more complicated than necessary. You shouldn't have to set up a database server and Docker just to sync a little bit of data. Ideally, there would be a sync server implementation that uses SQLite and can just run stand-alone.

There's a MR open:

https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs/issues/49...

Re: Self-Hosting a Firefox Sync Server

#78

Post by drdaeman »

63stack wrote: post #53
drdaeman wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sync is nothing but an awfully overengineered blob storage (I have implemented an alternative Accounts+Sync server when 1.5 came out, https://gitlab.com/drdaeman/firesync/ - long abandoned and the code is awful proof-of-concept inly, but the point here is to prove that I have a slightly educated opinion on the matter). IMHO, It would be best (for technical users) if Firefox forks would rather replace Sync with someth…

Is there a specification somewhere for the sync server that you followed, or did you figure out the endpoints/logic by looking at mozilla's sync server? I was thinking about taking a crack at this as well, but I can't find a spec, and I want to leave looking at the python/rust sync server source code as a last resort.

It is documented here: https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/storage/ap...

I'm not sure about the current status of this document. Years ago there were subtle nuances that I gad to reverse engineer looking at the source code and Firefox's actual behavior.

Re: Self-Hosting a Firefox Sync Server

#79

Post by accelbred »

sandreas wrote: post #3

Thank you, this is the only thing what slowed me down switching to Librewolf. Seems that MySQL and Spanner are the only supported DB-Engines by now, but there are efforts to support sqlite and Postgres[1]. I really hope these get merged soon, would make it much easier to backup your whole sync storage contained in one single sqlite file. However, a multiuser instance would probably be better stored via postgres due t…

You can use Librewolf with Mozilla's sync server; you don't have to self-host to have sync with it.

Re: Self-Hosting a Firefox Sync Server

#80

Post by charles_f »

charles_f wrote: post #17

I did that for a while, including hosting the auth myself. Then I realized Mozilla is probably one of the few companies I trust with my data, even though it's probably misplaced trust. The sync server is relatively straightforward to setup, but auth is quite more involved. I don't think it's worth it, compared to using the public hosted service

Gonna admit, that aged poorly, and very quickly.
Post reply on HN