Firefox Accounts

The Firefox Accounts (fxa) monorepo

Table of Contents

Getting Started
Contributing
Dependencies
Secrets
Firefox Custom Profile
Functional Tests
Node debugging
Android debugging
FxA Email Service
Firefox for Android
Firefox for iOS
Running with MailDev
Other tasks
Documentation

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Getting Started

1. Manually install the system dependencies for OS X or Ubuntu. Note that WSL is required for development work on Windows.

2. Clone this repository.

   git clone https://github.com/mozilla/fxa.git
   

3. Run:

   cd fxa
   npm install
   npm start
   

Note this starts up all required services, including Redis, MySQL, and Memcached. It is recommended that you don't run these services yourself, or occupy any of the server ports. Doing so may result in errors.

4. Visit 127.0.0.1:3030.

Use the PM2 tool to stop and start the servers, and read server logs.

To start all servers:

• npm start

The most common commands are:

• npm stop - stop all servers.

• ./pm2 status - display running servers.

• ./pm2 logs - logs for all servers (note: this must be used to verify accounts).

• ./pm2 logs 1 - display logs for process 1.

• ./pm2 stop 1 - stop process 1.

• ./pm2 restart 1 - restart process 1.

• More commands in the PM2 Readme.

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Contributing

See the separate CONTRIBUTING.md to learn how to contribute.

Workflow

This is an example workflow for fxa.

After installing fxa run npm start. Use ./pm2 status command to check the status of the servers:

To avoid wasting computer resources while not working on FxA make sure to stop the servers using npm stop. Once you are back working on FxA just use the npm start command to bring the servers back up.

Verifying email and viewing logs

Use the ./pm2 logs command to get the logs of all servers. You may also use ./pm2 logs [id] to just see the logs for that particular server.

When you signup for an account using the form on 127.0.0.1:3030/signup the "auth-server local mail helper" logs will print out the verification code that you need to copy paste into your browser to verify your account locally:

If you get an error status for any of the servers please verify that you installed all required dependencies. Otherwise file an issue on this repository or connect with the team on Firefox Accounts Riot.

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Dependencies

Required developer dependencies: Git, node.js 12+ with npm 6, Python 2.6+, Java 8+, Rust nightly+, libgmp, graphicsmagick, docker, grunt, gcloud CLI

OS X (with Brew):

Xcode and OS X Command Line Tools are required, install it and verify that command line tools installed:

xcode-select --install

then:

sudo easy_install pip && sudo pip install virtualenv

Install Docker for Mac | Docs

Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install build-essential git libgmp3-dev graphicsmagick  python-virtualenv python-dev pkg-config libssl-dev curl openjdk-11-jre firefox

Follow the Docker CE instructions to install Docker.

Docker commands require sudo, to avoid it, follow steps below:

1. Add the docker group if it doesn't already exist

sudo groupadd docker

2. Add the connected user $USER to the docker group

sudo gpasswd -a $USER docker

3. Restart the docker daemon

sudo service docker restart

Installing Node.js

We currently use Node 12. See https://nodejs.org

Alternatively, the Node Version Manager makes working with different versions of Node easy.

nvm install 12
nvm alias default 12

Installing Java

Java is used to run Selenium functional tests

OS X:

Download from java.com/en/download/

Installing Rust

Rust Nightly is used for the fxa-email-service

Ubuntu and OS X

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

Once the installer begins:

1. Select "2) Customize installation"
2. Leave "Default host triple" blank, hit "enter"
3. Type "nightly" for "Default toolchain"
4. Type "y" for "Modify PATH variable?"
5. Select "1) Proceed with installation"

Installing grunt

npm install -g grunt-cli

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Secrets

When developing locally you may need to set up some secrets in order to effectively work with certain servers. These secrets are managed at the package level.

Check out the Secrets section in the following READMEs:

• fxa-auth-server
• fxa-payments-server

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Firefox Custom Profile

Use npm run start-firefox to start Firefox with local server configurations. Available options:

• FXA_ENV=local or latest or stable or stage (NOTE: local is default).
• FXA_E10S=true - add this flag to turn on E10S. (NOTE: false by default).
• FXA_DESKTOP_CONTEXT - context= value. (NOTE: fx_desktop_v2 is default).
• FIREFOX_BIN=/Applications/FirefoxNightly.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin npm start
• FIREFOX_DEBUGGER=true - open Browser Toolbox on start (NOTE: false by default for speed).

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Functional Tests

The following requires the JDK and tests the local servers only.

To run all functional tests:

npm test

Note that as of 2019-07-08, running this command at the project root will fail (see issue #725). Instead, run the command in the server that needs to be tested.

To run a specific test or tests whose name matches part of a search string:

node tests/intern.js --suites=all --grep="Test string to search for"

To run a single test:

npm run test-functional -- "--grep=Test name"

--where 'Test name' is not the file name but the description/name of the test.

node tests/intern.js --grep="Test name"

run the above command from the fxa-content-server directory

Node debugging

It's possible to debug a running node process using a variety of debuggers (see the node debugging docs for details).

We have also extensively documented working with the FxA code-base using VS Code.

Debugging a server

In the case of Firefox Accounts, the pm2 process manager complicates setup a bit. Here's one approach that works:

1. Start the whole server as usual (npm install && npm start from top-level in the monorepo)
2. Stop the pm2-managed version of whatever server you care about:
   • Get the pm2 id for the server from ./pm2 ls
   • Stop the process by doing ./pm2 stop NN where NN is the pm2 id
3. Restart the server manually, passing the --inspect argument:
   • For fxa-content-server, fxa-payments-server, fxa-auth-server, or fxa-event-broker, just go to the package directory and do npm run start-dev-debug to start a debuggable server process.
   • For other servers, we just haven't added a start-dev-debug run script yet; feel free to add one by tracing through the existing run scripts to find the actual script that runs the server (not one that forks another script).
4. Connect to the process to debug it:
   • Using Google Chrome, go to chrome://inspect, then click the process to connect to devtools.
   • VSCode requires setting up a .vscode/launch.json file; see the VSCode docs for details.

Alternatively if you want to be able to debug any of several servers that is configured with a start-dev-debug script you can start pm2 using the debug_servers.json file:

pm2 kill
pm2 start debug_servers.json

Default Debug Ports

If you're using npm run start-dev-debug or pm2 with the debug_server.json, the following ports are used for --inspect:

Port	Service
9140	content-server
9150	admin-server
9160	auth-server
9170	payments-server
9180	event-broker

Debugging tests

The node debugger can also be attached to a running test process. Firefox Accounts uses a variety of test frameworks, so the steps vary for the different servers. The --inspect argument is used in the examples below, but --inspect-brk can also be used to pause the process as soon as it starts.

mocha tests (fxa-shared)

For mocha, pass the --timeout 0 option, otherwise the test will fail if you step through it and exceed the default timeout (currently 2 seconds on fxa-shared):

node --inspect ./node_modules/.bin/mocha --timeout 0 path/to/file

In fxa-shared, this incantation works for some directories, but not yet others.

jest tests (fxa-payments-server)

For jest, pass the --runInBand argument, so it doesn't fork off the test runner to a separate process that isn't available to the inspector:

node --inspect ./node_modules/.bin/jest --runInBand --config server/jest.config.js filematcher

where filematcher is a regex that matches against test file paths. If you omit filematcher, Jest will run all tests (but you have to hit Enter a second time to trigger the test run).

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Android debugging

The following technique works with any Android application and can also be used for Firefox for Android.

Simply forward the following ports from the host machine to the Android device:

npm run adb-reverse

or

adb reverse tcp:3030 tcp:3030 # Content server
adb reverse tcp:9000 tcp:9000 # Auth server
adb reverse tcp:9010 tcp:9010 # OAuth server
adb reverse tcp:1111 tcp:1111 # Profile server
adb reverse tcp:5000 tcp:5000 # Sync server

Then run npm start and get to work!

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FxA Email Service

Skip this if you are not working on the fxa-email-service.

The pm2 scripts run the latest docker version of the email service by default. If you want to start making changes to the email service then do the following:

1. Stop the email-service using ./pm2 stop <email_service_id>
2. Build the service: cd packages/fxa-email-service; cargo build --bin fxa_email_send
3. Run the service: cd packages/fxa-email-service; ./scripts/run_send.sh

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Firefox for iOS

Skip this if you are not working on Firefox for iOS and FxA.

You can test sync locally in Firefox iOS using the XCode simulator. Follow the steps at github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios and setup firefox-ios build locally. Currently there is no way to dynamically switch servers in Firefox for iOS, to use local servers you need to run the script below:

FIREFOX_IOS_HOME=<path_to_firefox_ios_project> npm run config-fxios

After the script you need to rebuild firefox-ios.

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Running with MailDev

If you want to inspect emails, you can run fxa with MailDev.

Install

npm install maildev -g

Run

npm start
./pm2 stop 'auth-server local mail helper'

Once services have started, you can start MailDev on port 9999. You might have to start MailDev with sudo permissions.

sudo maildev -s 9999

All emails sent can be viewed from http://localhost:1080.

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Other tasks

• Updating dependencies and npm-shrinkwrap.json files.

Documentation

The Firefox Ecosystem Platform serves as a documentation hub for Firefox Accounts, Services, Synced Client Integrations, and Subscription Platform.

In addition to the ecosystem docs, each package has it's own README.md and docs/ directory with info specific to that project.

• 123done README
• browserid-verifier README
• fortress README
• fxa-auth-db-mysql README / docs/
• fxa-auth-server README / docs/
• fxa-content-server README / docs/
• fxa-email-event-proxy README
• fxa-email-service README / docs/
• fxa-event-broker README / docs/
• fxa-geodb README
• fxa-js-client README
• fxa-payments-server README
• fxa-profile-server README / docs/
• fxa-shared README
• fxa-support-panel README