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Arkenfox user.js module for NixOS + home-manager

Motivation

Firefox's user.js can be used to store preferences and settings for Firefox, but it is painful to manually edit. There is a popular user.js optimised for ease of edition and hardening : Arkenfox's.

If one want to directly use it, there already is an option in home-manager to use a user.js : programs.firefox.profiles.<name>.extraConfig and programs.firefox.profiles.<name>.settings.

The problem with directly using Arkenfox's user.js is that handling updates to file after having gone through it to edit your preferences is a bit of a pain. In order to improve the situation, we implemented a script that parses Arkenfox's user.js and generate a home-manager module that allows setting the preferences using the merge algorithm of the NixOS module system. Furthermore, it keeps the edits outside the generated module. Any drift between the settings and the user.js will be caught by the module type-system.

Outputs

This flake exports a few things :

  • the script used for the extraction as packages.<system>.arkenfox-extractor.
  • the home-manager module as hmModules.arkenfox.
  • a rendered documentation of each supported user.js version as packages.<system>.arkenfox-v<version>-doc-static. Here version can be either a numeric one like 103_0 or master.

Home-manager module

To enable the module, you need to set both programs.firefox.arkenfox.enable to true and programs.firefox.arkenfox.version to the version you want to use. Ideally the version used is the same as Firefox's, but may differ if arkenfox hasn't yet been updated, or you want to keep your previous settings with the new Firefox version. In the case the versions do not match, a warning will be displayed when generating the configuration.

Then the settings can be set profile-by-profile using programs.firefox.profiles.<name>.arkenfox. The user.js file is subdivided into sections, subsections and individual settings that all have a default value, and may be commented or not. All this is present in the module. A setting can be set with <section-number>.<subsection-number>.<setting-name>.value and enabled with <section-number>.<subsection-number>.<setting-name>.enable. Sections and subsections can also be enabled and disabled. A setting value is only set if both its sections and subsection are enabled. Furthermore, a top level enable flag is present.

Since Arkenfox's settings are very opinionated and shouldn't be used unless they've been reviewed and agreed with, both the top level enable flag and all sections enable flags are false by default. On the other hand, the subsections enable flags are true by default. There is a enableAllSections top level flag that makes all sections enabled by default if this is what you want.

For example, if you want to enable the TOPLEVEL, STARTUP and GEOLOCATION sections, but still have Firefox check if it is the default browser, and you want to enable the search region setting that is commented in the default user.js but keep its value, you would do:

{
  programs.firefox = {
    enable = true;
    arkenfox = {
      enable = true;
      version = "103.0";
    };
    
    profiles.Default.arkenfox = {
      enable = true;
      "0000".enable = true;
      "0001" = {
        enable = true;
        "0101"."browser.shell.checkDefaultBrowser".value = true;
      };
      "0002" = {
        enable = true;
        "0204"."browser.search.region".enable = true;
      };
    };
  };
}

Documentation

Finding the section and subsection numbers and the option names can be a bit complicated. The authoritative source of truth is of course the user.js file on Arkenfox's GitHub, which you should read, at least the section you enable. For better usability, the metadata extracted is also used to generate a HTML file that may be more agreeable looking through.

Targets programs.<system>.arkenfox-v<version>-doc-static will build this html file. An example of a rendered documentation (WARNING: often outdated) can be found there. Each setting is presented as a table with a checkbox indicating if it is enabled by default, its name, and its default value.

You can build the documentation without copying the flake using (for example):

nix build "github:dwarfmaster/arkenfox-nixos#arkenfox-v103_0-doc-static"