Foxkeeper

Description

What did firefox do to your settings/extensions/bookmarks/etc. this time? If only you had your firefox profile in revision control, you would know exactly what changed… and be able to change it back!

Features

Foxkeeper preserves your settings, bookmarks, etc. in case firefox eats them! You can go back to the way firefox was when you last exited it, or the time before, back to when you first started using Foxkeeper.

Additionally, many firefox extensions don’t make much noise when they download and install updates. It’s hard to know that it has even happened, with a few exceptions. Even less common is any obvious indication of what actually changed.

Not only can Foxkeeper let you know that something has changed, if you feel especially motivated, you can review those changes yourself. Git’s standard GUI is used, allowing you to pick and choose which changes you’d like to keep, and which to omit. (By default, all the changes that firefox has made are staged, so you can just hit commit and be okay).

If you have the Copious Free Time and know what to look for, Foxkeeper could even help prevent you from being the victim of a nefarious plugin!

Requirements

You need Firefox (any relatively recent version should do) and Ruby 1.9 installed.

Rubygems:

parseconfig, to read firefox’s profiles.ini file.

Other programs:

The sqlite3 program (not just its libraries)

Installation/Setup

Note: Presently, Foxkeeper is only tested under Linux. These instructions should get easier over time as the project develops.

First, add the foxkeeper directory to your $PATH, so it can find its auxiliary ruby scripts. You may also need to change the paths at the top of the ruby scripts if necessary, to properly execute them with Ruby 1.9.

Then, install the necessary rubygems:

$ gem install parseconfig

In your ~/.mozilla/firefox directory, you will have directories for each profile, and a Crash Reports directory. In the profile directories you want to use foxkeeper on, run the following commands:

$ git init
$ echo "Cache/*" > .gitignore
$ sqlite-filter-install.rb
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Initial firefox settings"

Now that the setup is done, you should be able to run foxkeeper, like so:

$ foxkeeper

This will first run gitk to show you what has changed, then run firefox for you, then after firefox exits run git gui for you.

If you don’t usually use the terminal, you may want to edit firefox’s .desktop file in your distribution to run foxkeeper instead of firefox.

Implementation notes

In order to make the best use of space, and to better show you what has actually changed, a major goal of this project is to avoid committing binary blobs to the git repository. To that end, each binary file will be serialized to an appropriate text format representing the data in that file. For example, a large number of files used by firefox are SQLite databases, which can be dumped by SQLite itself to the SQL necessary to recreate it.

Unfortunately, some security-related files are in an ancient Berkeley DB format. An ffi binding to the relevant code from the NSS module is forthcoming, to serialize these files to an appropriate text format.

Suggestions and patches are welcome!

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

riddochc / Foxkeeper