Firefox Sync Server – My Thoughts

After getting a lot of trouble with the Xmarks sync on the quit old iceweasel that is installed on my desktop machine (Debian lenny), I decided to look for alternatives and found the firefox sync server. To run my own sync server I followed the installation instructions from mozilla and also some other nice guides available via websearch. Here are the basic steps:
get the necessary packages:
aptitude install python-dev mercurial sqlite3 python-virtualenv

Create a new user for the sync server using the apropriate commands and include www-data, the apache user, in the newly created group to give acces to the python script.

install the server from source:

$ hg clone https://hg.mozilla.org/services/server-full
$ cd server-full
$ make build

Create some directories as there are

data for the sqlite files – I will switch to mysql very soon
tmp for some temporary python files
logs just to keep the synchronisation logs seperate from the rest – I am not sure about access rights when writing directly to the logs directory

And now edit the configuration files:
$ vi sync.wsgi [..]


os.environ['PYTHON_EGG_CACHE'] = '/path/to/tmp/python-eggs'

[..]
$ vi development.ini


    [..]

[handler_syncserver_errors] class = handlers.RotatingFileHandler args = (‘/path/to/logs/sync-error.log’,) [..]
$ vi etc/sync.conf


    [..]
    [storage]

    backend = syncstorage.storage.sql.SQLStorage

    sqluri = sqlite:////path/to/data/usersettings.db

    [..]
    [auth]

    backend = services.auth.sql.SQLAuth

    sqluri = sqlite:////path/to/data/usersettings.db
    [..]

fallback_node = https:/// [..]
And finally add the directives for apache to access the wsgi interface:
WSGIProcessGroup ffsync WSGIDaemonProcess ffsync user=ffsync group=ffsync processes=2 threads=25 WSGIPassAuthorization On WSGIScriptAlias /ffsync /home/ffsync/server-full/sync.wsgi