Firefox/Kinto

Kinto Integration in Firefox

Kinto is a simple JSON storage service that was integrated into Firefox, mainly for RemoteSettings and the storage.sync API.

Key features

• Diff-based data synchronization
• Offline persistence
• Data integrity/signing
• Peer review to publish data changes
• Admin panel UI
• Built-in Telemetry
• Firefox Accounts Integration

Use Cases

Component	Description	Contact
RemoteSettings	Firefox/RemoteSettings allows to ship data and files to Firefox. It is used for blocklists, security state, Activity Stream, Fennec assets and experiments etc.	Mathieu Leplatre — :leplatrem
storage.sync	WebExtensions API for user data storage. Every users have their own bucket (default bucket plugin), the allowed amount of data is limited (quotas plugin), and the data is encrypted using Firefox Accounts keys. See also CloudServices/Sync/ExtensionStorage_Design_Doc	Ethan Glasser Camp — :glasserc
Test Pilot	Some experiments (like Notes) require user data to be saved remotely and synchronized across devices. A Kinto server was deployed with Firefox Accounts login support, and kinto.js library is used to encrypt and sync data.	Senior Software Engineer — :vladikoff

See also Kinto at Mozilla

Feel free to come and discuss on #storage :)

Usage

Two client libraries are vendored in Firefox:

• Kinto HTTP client: for direct interactions with the Kinto HTTP API
• Kinto offline client: for offline persistence in internal SQLite or IndexedDB

HTTP client

const { KintoHttpClient } = Cu.import("resource://services-common/kinto-http-client.js", {});

const remote = "https://kinto.dev.mozaws.net/v1";
const headers = { Authorization: "Basic " + btoa("user:pass") };

const client = new KintoHttpClient(remote, {headers});
const records = await client.bucket("a-bucket")
                            .collection("a-collection")
                            .listRecords();

Offline client

const { Kinto } = Cu.import("resource://services-common/kinto-offline-client.js", {});

const remote = "https://kinto.dev.mozaws.net/v1";
const headers = { Authorization: "Basic " + btoa("user:pass") };

const kinto = new Kinto();
const bucket = "a-bucket";
const collection = kinto.collection("a-collection");

// Fetch/Publish changes.
const { ok } = await collection.sync({ bucket, remote, headers });

// Read local collection of records.
const records = await collection.list();

Resources

• Kinto at Mozilla (blog post)

Contribute

Generate bundles

The Kinto client libraries are developed independently on Github:

• kinto-http is the HTTP client for the Kinto REST API;
• kinto.js is the offline-first client for Kinto.

With the help of Babel and browserify, a bundle is generated for Firefox with the minimum transpilation possible (eg. CommonJS require, ES7 decorators).

kinto.js

From the kinto.js repo, generate the moz-kinto-offline-client.js file:

$ npm run dist-fx

And overwrite it in the Firefox code base:

$ cp dist/moz-kinto-offline-client.js ../mozilla-central/services/common/kinto-offline-client.js

kinto-http.js

From the kinto-http.js repo, generate the moz-kinto-http-client.js file:

$ npm run dist-fx

And overwrite it in the Firefox code base:

$ cp dist/moz-kinto-http-client.js ../mozilla-central/services/common/kinto-http-client.js