WIP: firefox/wrapper.nix: make firefox wrapper configurable by the user #57554

xaverdh · 2019-03-13T00:46:33Z

Motivation for this change

This is a proof of principle for allowing firefox and its variants to be customized and extended more easily.
Could be a first step towards solving #15959.

Very WIP at the moment.

nixos-discourse · 2019-03-13T00:50:58Z

This pull request has been mentioned on Nix community. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/firefox-extensions/1122/39

worldofpeace · 2019-03-13T01:17:48Z

Nice, I too discovered that we could accomplish this with policies, good to see something in the works 👍

ghost · 2019-03-13T05:06:50Z

Thanks for taking this on!
I don't think we should expose extensions as a separate config option as long as they are imperative instead of declarative, given that they so thoroughly violate the expectations usually put upon modules and packages.
I barely know what I'm talking about, but maybe user namespaces with bind mounts are something we would want to look into to provide declarative extensions without having to hack around in Firefox itself.

xaverdh · 2019-03-13T11:43:20Z

I am not quite sure what you mean by extensions being "imperative" in this context.
The option as it is now, works as follows:
You can specify either a local xpi file or an url (e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/downloads/file/1189923/noscript_security_suite-latest-fx.xpi) from which the xpi will get download. Then the policies engine will ensure that the extension is installed (on startup).
We could make it more declarative by using "Locked" perhaps, this will prevent the real state diverging from the one as specified in the config.
See the docs here

xaverdh · 2019-03-13T11:53:09Z

user namespaces with bind mounts are something we would want to look into to provide declarative extensions without having to hack around in Firefox itself.

This was actually my first approach, and I have an implementation using user namespaces and bind mounts in my own nixos config. I did not attempt to upstream that, because its quite "advanced" technology; nixpkgs is more than just linux. I just don't know if that works on all platforms we might want to support.

Edit: The logic in my nixos config is overly complicated, because the distribution subdirectory does not exist in the nixpkgs firefox builds. If we changed that, it could be as simple as:

enter new user and mount namespace
bind mount configuration into the installation directory

If this solution is preferred, I can also implement that.

ghost · 2019-03-13T12:43:37Z

Imperative means it will permanently install these to your home directory instead of being confined to the package, as a package option should be. Maybe I am alone in this concern but that doesn't seem very compatible with the Nix philosophy.
If you've already got the bindmount solution working, maybe we want to provide a wrapper with that specifically for Linux? Anyone not on Linux could still choose to permainstall extensions via the policy even if it wasn't exposed as a separate option, but having them do it themselves should provide more opportunity to realize the special effect that will have and doesn't force us to support that hacky-at-best mechanism for the forseeable future.

xaverdh · 2019-03-13T12:57:30Z

Ah ok, I see what you mean by imperative vs declarative now.
Ok, maybe we should Indeed do some work on the extensions option.
But this can be done with policies (there is also an Uninstall option).

ghost · 2019-03-13T13:02:30Z

But this can be done with policies (there is also an Uninstall option).

For that you would need to calculate the new policy at runtime from the policy of the most recently executed version. I don't even want to begin to imagine the complexity involved. That would be hard in a NixOS option, and it sounds like just asking for trouble in a package option.

xaverdh · 2019-03-13T13:18:33Z

Yes, that does sound rather complicated. Also there are still quite a few bugs in the current implementation of the related policies options.
I will remove the extensions option from this pull request for now. The remaining stuff is still useful on its own.
Maybe we could include a hint in the docs that extensions can be included in the extraPolicies option, mentioning the imperative nature of this approach.

xaverdh · 2019-03-14T21:22:16Z

Actually, do we have a place for documentation of individual package options?

timokau · 2019-03-14T21:35:06Z

Not really, but it would probably fit next to the vim section in the manual: https://nixos.org/nixpkgs/manual/#users-guide-to-vim-pluginsaddonsbundlesscripts-in-nixpkgs

xaverdh · 2019-03-15T02:31:02Z

Ok, I ended up adding the docs to package-notes.xml. But we really need a separate manual for packages / package options.
Or user docs in general...

timokau · 2019-03-16T14:55:58Z

doc/package-notes.xml

+    The older
+    <link xlink:href="https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-using-autoconfig">
+    AutoConfig </link> method, and the more recent
+    <link xlink:href="https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/README.md#extensions">


The hook to #extensions probably shouldn't be here, as the explanation is not extension-specific.

timokau · 2019-03-16T14:58:27Z

doc/package-notes.xml

+    disables autoplaying videos, could be specified as follows (the syntax of
+    AutoConfig is a superset of user.js):
+<programlisting>
+firefox.override { extraPrefs = '' pref("media.autoplay.default",1); ''; }


I'd prefer this to be split up over multiple lines for readability:

firefox.override { extraPrefs = '' pref("media.autoplay.default",1); ''; }

timokau · 2019-03-16T15:04:30Z

doc/package-notes.xml

+</programlisting>
+    To disable upload of telemetry data, you could use:
+<programlisting>
+firefox.override { extraPolicies = { DisableTelemetry = true; }; }


I don't like that the json options start with an uppercase letter, going against the conventional nix style. I don't really know what to do about it though.

timokau · 2019-03-16T15:05:48Z

doc/package-notes.xml

+
+   <para>
+    The policies framework can be used to enforce the installation of
+    extensions as follows:


Before showing how to install extensions, we should list the caveats:

installs into user dir, no automatic unintallation

no upgrades which will be a dealbreaker to most

Sorry, what do you mean by "no upgrades" exactly?
The addon should update as usual, unless you specify an exact version in the url and lock this, I guess.

I'm not sure that is true. First of all I would assume (but don't know for sure), that a link like https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/downloads/file/1189923/noscript_security_suite-latest-fx.xpi links to a specific version (despite having latest in the filename, as there is also a specific fileid).

And even if that isn't the case, there is this: mozilla/policy-templates#207

Have you tried this with an addon that updated afterwards?

mozilla/policy-templates#158 explains what the "latest" part in the url does. I did not try with local extensions, I will do that.

timokau · 2019-03-16T15:07:12Z

doc/package-notes.xml

+
+   <para>
+    The firefox (wrapper) package can be configured through several mechanisms.
+    The older


I don't think the old/new wording fits here. It suggests that the "new" method is a replacement for the old one, which it is not.

pkgs/applications/networking/browsers/firefox/wrapper.nix

timokau · 2019-03-16T15:16:24Z

pkgs/applications/networking/browsers/firefox/wrapper.nix

@@ -111,14 +126,55 @@ let
        cp -R --no-preserve=mode,ownership ${browser}/Applications/${browserName}.app $out/Applications
        rm -f $out${browser.execdir or "/bin"}/${browserName}
      '' + ''
-        if [ ! -x "${browser}${browser.execdir or "/bin"}/${browserName}" ]
+
+        # Link the runtime. The executable itself has to be copied,


Have you looked into patching firefox? While this solution works, it is a little hacky.

I have, and I find the code to be surprisingly unreadable for a newcomer. I can spend some more time on that, of course.
If somebody else with more knowledge of the mozilla codebase wants to take a shot at that / point me to the right location in the sources, I am quite happy to do that.

Have a look at this: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko/blob/72f5488046d2d4cc8c0470f071db8f504629f95b/browser/components/enterprisepolicies/EnterprisePolicies.js#L362

For the autoconfig part, I guess the readConfigFile and openAndEvaluateJSFile here are responsible: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko/blob/72f5488046d2d4cc8c0470f071db8f504629f95b/extensions/pref/autoconfig/src/nsReadConfig.cpp#L120

Yes, but where is XREAppDist actually set?
here ?

That in turn references NS_GRE_DIR, which comes from aGREDir passed to nsXREDirProvider::Initialize.

here perhaps?

If ld returned 1 exit status, there may be a more informative error message earlier in the log.

Maybe you ran out of ram or something?

A friend of mine lent me some more capable hardware, it compiles now.

Nice! Is it working?

I got the policies engine working. AutoConfig appears to be more trouble, because of the lock file + obfuscation value + config file proper thing.
Also its cpp instead of javascript, so debugging is harder.

Nice! Yeah AutoConfig does seem a little unnecessary complicated.

This commit changes the way the firefox wrapper works to allow passing system wide configuration to the firefox instance, in the form of an enterprise policies file (policies.json) and/or an AutoConfig file. Since firefox essentially hard codes the paths to these configuration files, and due to the immutable nature of the nix store, we have to copy/symlink the entire runtime. Also since firefox resolves those paths relative to the "true" path of the binary (i.e. following symlinks), the binary itself has to be copied.

This documents configuring firefox by passing options to the wrapper.

nbp · 2019-04-05T14:51:23Z

@xaverdh reading the patches, I wonder, is there any reasons to not copy everything over to the new directory?

Knowing that you can uncompress the tarball anywhere you want, I would expect the build result to be position independent of its top-level directory. Making a copy (maybe hard-link) could be a simpler way than selecting the few files which are mandatory.

xaverdh · 2019-04-05T22:04:48Z

The actual runtime is position independent (on linux at least). The wrapper is not (there is already a wrapper coming from the firefox-unwrapped derivation), so that path and the symlink have to be rewritten. I went for symlinks instead of hardlinks, because I did not want to make assumptions on the file system used, etc. Also how would using hard links simplify anything really?

Making a recursive copy would simplify the code somewhat I guess, at the cost of using more memory.

xaverdh · 2019-04-05T22:08:00Z

So maybe if we could change firefox-unwrapped to not wrap the binary (e.g. move that code to the actual wrapper), this could be simplified a lot.
I don't know how to do that in detail though.

Qubasa · 2019-08-28T14:48:25Z

@samueldr So based on the wrapper from @xaverdh I have added extension support and a lot of anti tracking / speed improvements for firefox. If this gets merged I can then open a new pull request.
If someone is interested the wrapper is here: https://github.com/Luis-Hebendanz/nix-configs/blob/master/overlays/firefox-with-config.nix
And an example usage is here: https://github.com/Luis-Hebendanz/nix-configs/blob/master/firefox.nix

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xaverdh · 2020-12-03T09:18:34Z

Closing since #91724 was merged

xaverdh mentioned this pull request Mar 13, 2019

Firefox configuration tracking issue (+Thunderbird?) nix-community/home-manager#606

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GrahamcOfBorg added 10.rebuild-darwin: 0 This PR does not cause any packages to rebuild on Darwin 10.rebuild-linux: 1-10 labels Mar 13, 2019

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timokau mentioned this pull request Mar 23, 2019

[RFC 0042] NixOS settings options NixOS/rfcs#42

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This was referenced Mar 24, 2019

nixos/redshift: rework to use config file #50979

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Firefox configurable #58195

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xaverdh added 2 commits March 30, 2019 00:06

nixpkgs doc: add package notes for firefox

3869826

This documents configuring firefox by passing options to the wrapper.

xaverdh force-pushed the firefox-configurable branch from a94b0b6 to 3869826 Compare March 29, 2019 23:13

samueldr added the 2.status: work-in-progress This PR isn't done label Jul 27, 2019

xaverdh mentioned this pull request Aug 21, 2019

firefox global config not working #67117

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Qubasa mentioned this pull request Nov 26, 2019

Firefox with extensions and global config #74297

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xaverdh closed this Dec 3, 2020

xaverdh mentioned this pull request Dec 7, 2020

Firefox extensions discussion #105783

Open

WIP: firefox/wrapper.nix: make firefox wrapper configurable by the user #57554

WIP: firefox/wrapper.nix: make firefox wrapper configurable by the user #57554

Conversation

xaverdh commented Mar 13, 2019

Motivation for this change

nixos-discourse commented Mar 13, 2019

worldofpeace commented Mar 13, 2019

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nbp commented Apr 5, 2019

xaverdh commented Apr 5, 2019

xaverdh commented Apr 5, 2019

Qubasa commented Aug 28, 2019

stale bot commented Jun 1, 2020

xaverdh commented Dec 3, 2020

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