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When I think of dotfile management, I think it means handling standalone config files that are a few KB, intended to be user-editable, and are probably not changed by the running program itself.
I don't think the Firefox config files meet those criteria. I don't know, because I just leave them alone. I think a better tool for managing Firefox config would be to sync your profile, either through their servers or by self-hosting a sync server
FF sync doesn't cover everything, in particular toolbar setup. There is a user.js file you can create that plugs the gap but this hits the exact problem (picking the right folder) the OP stated
There are still things you can do with Firefox to fit the dotfiles pattern if you care enough. The files managing the profile and profile directory are mostly static and plain-text. For example I had a profiles.ini pointing to a fixed profile directory default containing a user.js file with most of my settings. You also need to update and commit the installs.ini for every machine, because Firefox insists to have a unique default-profile entry for every system/install. (And the actual setup was even more complicated and contained a merge-script to clone/update/merge multiple user.js sources, but most people wouldn't need that)
These days I use librewolf which has saner, more secure defaults and a more powerful global (profile-independent) config file. All I now store in my dotfiles is .librewolf/librewolf.overrides.cfg.
Yeah, I'll have to study some more examples and read the docs. With some creativity I might be able to finagle something using the --target option. Thanks for weighing in.
Sort of in this topic, I stumbled on this today and thought it looked interesting. Haven’t had a chance to look at it at all.
I think this will hit the same problem - the profile folders are named differently every install. While you could theoretically back up the whole folder there are references inside that would break if you used it on different systems
UPDATE - looks like chezmoi MIGHT handle this https://www.chezmoi.io/reference/templates/functions/mozillaInstallHash/. Haven't found a working example of it in use though
Yeap, chezmoi is my go to for dotfiles management
Stow has no “glob for target” option, so you can't do *.profile.
You could write a script that, when you're deploying a stow, symlinks the profile into the right location. You'd have to remember to run it in the future so create a README file and include the instructions.
You mean write a script with something like find followed by stow --target=/path/to/profile/folder firefox?
I just look for the folder with -release on the end
PROFPATH=$(grep 'Path=' $HOME/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini | sed s/^Path=// | grep release)
Yeah, exactly. You could glob with find to locate the directory, store the path in a variable and then pass that to stow.
I'm not sure what you have to do to make Firefox acknowledge the profile, but I believe it simply enumerates all of the folders in the directory and displays all that are valid (but definitely double check on that first).
Ansible has extensive tools for applying partial configs to specific configuration files, leaving the rest unchanged.
It's meant for remote hosts, but it works fine pointed at localhost.
Ansible might be overkill - might be enough to make a quick bash script that finds the most recently active Firefox profile and just drops the files you care about there.
This does sound like more than most dotfile managers as are able to handle.