Updating (and Deprecating) the Weave Minimal Server

With the release of Firefox 4 (yay!), the sync experience is much more integrated into the browser. However, some of the changes are problematic for the minimal server. There are a couple you may need to know about:

1) Because Firefox looks for some user functions, the setup process to access a minimal server is non-standard. It goes like this:

1. register the account with the create_user script. This has been updated to understand email addresses as usernames and will correctly convert them to the base32-encoded equivalent. Note that this is not your sync key or anything like that. It’s just an encoding of your username.

   FF4 Sync no longer exposes the concept of a sync key, so this may be unfamilliar to people. Think of it as your ssh passphrase for Sync. It should be secure and reasonably long.

2. in Firefox preferences, under sync, click on “Set Up Firefox Sync”
3. Choose “I already have a Firefox Sync account”
4. On the next screen, ignore all the nifty JPAKE stuff and click on “I don’t have the device with me” (You can use this for adding new devices to an already-configured account)
5. The resulting screen will look like a connection screen you might expect. Make sure to select a custom server, and don’t forget the / at the end of your url if you use a prefix such as /weave/. You will need to know your secret Sync Key, but that’s no different than before.

That should be it!

2) There’s a new version of the minimal server. For many of you, this will not be a needed upgrade. However, it puts in new support for quota data, lets you use email addresses as usernames and addresses a few functions-in-parameters problems that some versions of php have. If you’re running smoothly right now, you may not want to upgrade, but if any of the above is giving you trouble, you can get it from hg ( in the weave_minimal directory) or grab the updated tarball.

This will almost certainly be the last update to the minimal server. This is not a change in philosophy – we’re still big believers that people should be able to host their own data – but a reflection of the fact that the python server is the future. There are several reasons for this:

1. The python server provides the full set of functionality, including the user api.
2. The python server is exactly the same codebase as we’re rolling out across Mozilla, which means we’ll only need to maintain one codebase moving forwards. It’s not just the minimal php server we’re deprecating. The full one will be going away as well.
3. It’s almost as easy to set up as the minimal server, but gives you lots of tasty configuration options if you want to do more advanced things

You can check out and build the full server at http://hg.mozilla.org/services/server-full/ and get lots of details on how to build it at http://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-sync.html. We’d love to hear feedback you have on it.

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