We had a problem of customizing the Firefox browser configuration using Meilix generator so we used the skel folder in Linux. The /etc/skel directory contains files and directories that are automatically copied over to a new user’s home directory when such user is created by the useradd program.
Firefox generally reads its settings from ~/.mozilla/firefox folder present in Linux home of the user, which is changed when user modifies his settings like changing the homepage or disabling the bookmarks. To add these changes for every new user we can copy these configurations into skel folder.
Which we have done with Meilix which have these configurations in it and can be modified by using Meilix generator.
If you are going to look in your ~/.mozilla/firefox folder you will find a random string followed by .default folder this will contain the default settings of your Firefox browser and this random string is created uniquely for every user. The profile name will be different for all users but should always end with .default so if we use skel the .default will be same for everyone and we may choose any name for that like we have used meilix.default in below script.
For example to change the default homepage URL we can create a script that can be used by Meilix generator to modify the URL in Meilix.
#!/bin/bash set -eu # firefox preferences_file="`echo meilix-default-settings/etc/skel/.mozilla/firefox/meilix.default/user.js`" if [ -f "$preferences_file" ] then echo "user_pref(\"browser.startup.homepage\", \"${event_url}\");" >> $preferences_file fi
Here the ${event_url} is the environment variable sent by Meilix generator to be added to configuration of Firefox that is added to skel folder in Meilix.
We can similarly edit more configuration by editing the file pref.js file it contains the configuration for Firefox like bookmarks, download location, default URL etc.