Firefox Sync Server

Introduction

This journal entry was written by me, Brandon Nolet, in the context that I’m sick of looking up links. It’s time to set up a Firefox Sync server at home.

Docker

As I wrote in some previous posts I use Docker for my setup. This means that I’m already setup to use Docker for this purpose too! Luckily a few folks have already gone through this process before and it’s also unofficially supported. Usually the big oof with Docker is with networking tools not being very well supported or being too complex to configure.

There were so many damn ports to configure with the Plex setup, and I was not happy about that. Hopefully this time will be a little simpler.

Configuration

I’ll be following this guide from @[email protected] as I’m not willing to build the container myself for this. Half of it is laziness, the other half is being afraid of this turning into a whole night thing just trying to get it working. I’m sure some of you can relate.

Even though I followed the guide, there were some differences between my resulting configuration and the guide’s configuration.

Differences

The first difference is relating to the ports. I didn’t expose port 5000. I had no need for it as I’m routing the connection through my nginx-proxy container. As well, I didn’t append :5000 to the FF_SYNCSERVER_PUBLIC_URL value.

The reason for routing the connection through the nginx-proxy container is twofold. The first reason is that I want the connection to be secured through HTTPS/SSL. The second reason is that the only way I would be able to connect to the server from my work laptop would be through port 443. As it turns out, this configuration routes the connection through that port! Gold.

Lastly, because I’m routing the connection through to the nginx-proxy I had to use the VIRTUAL_HOST and VIRTUAL_PORT directives.

Conclusion

Wow, that worked right away! There was…no troubleshooting whatsoever. I wish most installations were like this.