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All Projects → michielbdejong → fxa-self-hosting

michielbdejong / fxa-self-hosting

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Instructions for hosting a Firefox Accounts instance on your own domain name

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fxa-self-hosting

Instructions for hosting Mozilla Services on your own domain name. Services included so far:

  • General:

    • a simple nginx-based proxy
    • instructions for home-hosting using pagekite
    • instructions for configuring Firefox Desktop to use your self-hosted services
    • instructions for configuring Firefox OS to use your self-hosted services

  • Firefox Accounts, including:

    • fxa-content-server
    • fxa-profile-server
    • fxa-auth-server
    • fxa-oauth-server
    • browserid-verifier
    • fxa-auth-db-mysql

  • Firefox Sync, including:

    • syncserver (this includes tokenserver)
    • syncto (only required for Firefox OS)

Not sec-reviewed, use at own risk!

These scripts are not security-reviewed Mozilla software, and meant only for people who want to have some fun trying out self-hosting. Create an empty Firefox profile for trying it out, don't sync your main profile's data to it, it's not secure enough for that.

If you use this in production for your own personal data (including for instance all the passwords you saved in your browser), you will have to do your own security review, server hardening, and intrusion detection, and make sure to keep both your host server and the containers patched with security updates.

This is especially true if you want to use these scripts to host Firefox Accounts and linked services for other people besides yourself.

To give an example, the fxa-auth-db-mysql container connects to mysql using the root user and no password.

Also, the syncserver stores data just in-memory, so synced data is lost not only when you remove the syncserver container, but even if you just restart it.

If you find a security issue with these scripts (or other improvements), please [open a github issue] about it. Pull requests welcome! :)

Audience

This guide is intended for people with basic sysadmin experience, and not all the steps you will need to take (e.g. using ssh, obtaining a TLS certificate, installing server software) are spelled out in detail. If you're having any trouble, you can ask for help by mentioning me (michielbdejong) in the #fxa channel on irc.mozilla.org, or email me (michiel at mozilla dot com).

Architecture

The scripts in this self-hosting guide will create 9 containers: one TLS-offloading proxy, 6 services which run on various ports, and two supporting ones, which are not publically accessible:

                                   INTERNET
                                       |
                                       v
                          fxa-self-hosting/"proxy":1111,443,8000,9010,3030,5000
          _____________________________|______________________________
          |              |       |       |           |               |
          v              |       v       |           v               |
fxa-profile-server:1111  |  syncto:8000  |  fxa-content-server:3030  |
                         v               v                           v
              fxa-auth-server:443  fxa-oauth-server:9010        syncserver:5000
                         |               |                           |
                         |                \_________________________/
                         |                            |
                         v                            v
          fxa-auth-db-mysql/"httpd":3306    browserid-verifier/"verifier.local":5050

The lines indicate container linking. You can see these as the --link parameters in setup.sh. The various servers also communicate with each other via the internet (e.g. the syncto container will do a https request that goes out to the internet, comes back in to the proxy, and from there goes to the syncserver), and via the browser (e.g. the fxa-content-server serves up webpages that make XHR requests to several other services). You can see these relations as the -e SOME_URL = "https://$1:1234/" parameters in setup.sh:

 _________
/         \
|      fxa-content-server
|     /    |
^    |     v
|    | fxa-profile-server      syncto
|    v     |           |         |
|    |\    v           |         v
^    | fxa-auth-server |      syncserver
|    v     |           v
|     \    v           /
|      fxa-oauth-server
\________/

Prerequisites

For self-hosting (i.e. hosting an instance the Mozilla Services yourself, on a server that's connected to the internet), you will need:

  • A server with probably 1 or 2 Gigs of memory and Docker installed, and that's not doing anything yet that occupies port 443 (i.e. not hosting any websites), and with Docker installed.
  • A domain name or subdomain you control and can point to this server
  • A TLS certificate for this (sub-)domain. Once you have your server running and your (sub-)domainname pointed to it in DNS (wait for DNS propagation), you can get one for free from LetsEncrypt.

If you prefer to host the services on a computer in your house ("home-hosting"), then you need to make this computer addressable on the public internet. You can do this using a reverse proxy tunnel like Pagekite (see instructions below), or maybe with DynDNS.

The reverse proxy tunnel needs to run on an addressable server, but it can be a much smaller (cheaper) one, and also, this reverse proxy tunnel will not store any of your data (the data would be in your house), and if configured correctly, it cannot eavesdrop on any of the traffic that goes through it (because TLS is terminated in your house, not at the proxy).

Note that the same disclaimer applies, that these scripts have not been reviewed for security issues, so don't storing valuable data like your saved passwords is all at your own risk.

Setup

In these instructions, I use fxa.michielbdejong.com as the example subdomain on which all the services will be running (using various TCP ports). Replace this string with your own (sub-)domain name wherever you see it. Note that one of the services (fxa-auth-server) will be occupying port 443 (https://fxa.michielbdejong.com/), so if you already run your website or blog on your server, you will want to use an extra server, on a subdomain (I used fxa. in this case).

Step 1: Getting the TLS certificate

If you get your TLS certificate using LetsEncrypt, it will be saved to /etc/letsencrypt. Find your certificate there, and copy it to a convenient location on the server that will be running the services. Note that it's necessary to append chain.pem to cert.pem, so that the nginx proxy will present a convincing trust chain to https clients. In this case, I'm saving the cert in a newly created folder, /root/fxa-cert. If you used the certonly method, /etc/letsencrypt/live may not exist, but you can probably still find the .pem files in some folder under /etc/letsencrypt if the registration was successful:

cd /root
cp -r /etc/letsencrypt/live/fxa.michielbdejong.com ./fxa-cert
chmod -R ugo+r ./fxa-cert
cat ./fxa-cert/cert.pem ./fxa-cert/chain.pem > ./fxa-cert/combined.pem

Step 2 (home-hosting only): Set up your pagekite frontend

Replace 'secretsecretsecret' with the secret from your ~/.pagekite.rc file in the following command, and run it on the pagekite frontend (the server to which DNS for fxa.michielbdejong.com points):

pagekite.py --isfrontend --domain *:fxa.michielbdejong.com:secretsecretsecret --ports=80,1111,3030,5000,8000,443,9010
echo TODO: not use a http connection (?) to the frontend

Step 3: Run build.sh

The build.sh script from this repo will build the necessary Docker images. This will probably take up to half an hour, so grab a coffee. You should run this script regularly, for instance when a new patch version of node 0.10 becomes available.

Step 4: Run setup.sh

Running setup.sh fxa.michielbdejong.com (script in the root of this repo) will stop and destroy all running Docker containers, so don't run it on a server where you're also running some other Docker-based things. Make sure to run it with your own sub-domain instead of 'fxa.michielbdejong.com', of course. You may also want to convert this bash script to a docker-compose.yml file if that's your thing; the result will be the same.

The script assumes that ./fxa-cert/combined.pem and ./fxa-cert/privkey.pem exist.

Check if you see nine Docker containers running in docker ps -a and none of them exited. It can take a further 10 or 20 seconds before the fxa-content-server will start responding (you will see a 502 Bad Gateway page from the nginx proxy until then).

Step 5 (home-hosting only): Set up your pagekite backend

On MacOS, Docker runs inside a virtual machine, probably on 192.168.99.100. In any case, you can use your browser or a http tool like curl to test if https://192.168.99.100 is responding.

Run fly.sh fxa.michielbdejong.com from this repo, and maybe restart the pagekite frontend and backend (killing all pagekite processes from ps auxwww | grep pagekite in between) until there are no rejected duplicates and https://fxa.michielbdejong.com looks the same as https://192.186.99.100 (or whatever your Docker VM IP), and same for the https services on ports :1111, :3030, :5000, :8000, and :9010.

Step 6: Configuring content server

Looking for a proper way to do this through env vars; until then:

docker exec -it -u root content /bin/bash
root@1e1dbee9b940:/home/fxa/fxa-content-server# apt-get update && apt-get install -yq vim
root@1e1dbee9b940:/home/fxa/fxa-content-server# vim ./server/config/local.json +9
-> change "YOU MUST CHANGE ME" to some random string (e.g. `pwgen 40 1`)
root@1e1dbee9b940:/home/fxa/fxa-content-server# exit

and restart the content and proxy containers (in that order, since the proxy container links to the content container):

docker restart content ; docker restart proxy

Step 7: Configuring syncserver

Looking for a proper way to do this through env vars; until then:

docker exec -it -u root sync /bin/bash
root@b5c1ba63de07:/home/app/syncserver# apt-get update && apt-get install -yq vim
root@b5c1ba63de07:/home/app/syncserver# vim ./local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/tokenserver/verifiers.py +85
-> edit verifier_url = "http://verifier.local:5050/v2"
root@b5c1ba63de07:/home/app/syncserver# exit

and restart the sync and proxy containers (in that order, since the proxy container links to the sync container):

docker restart sync ; docker restart proxy

Step 8: Creating your account

Sign up on https://fxa.michielbdejong.com:3030/, and instead of going to look for the verification email, run:

docker exec -it httpdb mysql -e "USE fxa; UPDATE accounts SET emailVerified=1;"

to mark your email address as verified.

NB: If you get https://fxa.michielbdejong.com:3030/unexpected_error, run localStorage.clear() in the console and hard-refresh.

Step 9: Configure Firefox Desktop

Edit the values in about:config like so:

Image about:config

Step 10: (Firefox OS only) Configure and build Gaia

In build/config/common-settings.json, edit:

And in build/config/phone/custom-prefs.js (assuming you're building for the phone), add:

There are also two prefs you need to change at the B2G level, but if you're using B2G-Desktop, you can change it in the /Applications/B2GDebug.app/Contents/Resources/defaults/pref/b2g.js file without having to rebuild all of B2G. The prefs to change are:

Debugging

If DNS hasn't propagated yet, you may need to spike /etc/hosts in the profile and verifier.local containers:

docker exec -u root -it verifier.local /bin/bash
docker exec -u root -it profile /bin/bash
-> echo 45.32.232.152 fxa.michielbdejong.com >> /etc/hosts

... or just wait for a bit. :)

To debug one of the containers, e.g. the one with container id ea298056cc in docker ps:

 docker exec -u root -it ea298056cc /bin/bash
 # add some console.log statements to the code
 docker restart ea298056cc
 docker restart proxy #and/or whichever containers link to the container you edited
 docker logs -f ea298056cc

You can also run a container interactively, check setup.sh for the startup params for each one.

Again, you will have to restart containers that link to the restarted one, for instance the main fxa-self-hosting proxy.

A nice tool for seeing the contents of your sync server is syncclient. Apart from following syncclient's readme instructions, make sure to edit syncclient/client.py like this:

-TOKENSERVER_URL = "https://token.services.mozilla.com/"
-FXA_SERVER_URL = "https://api.accounts.firefox.com"
+TOKENSERVER_URL = "https://fxa.michielbdejong.com:5000/token/"
+FXA_SERVER_URL = "https://fxa.michielbdejong.com"

And then try running commands like get_collection_counts, get_records history, or get_record crypto keys with it.

Disclaimer

Don't try this at home. This is a work-in-progress, hasn't been security-reviewed yet, and it's just not secure enough to host your valuable Firefox Sync data.

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