Document how to use primed profile

[vringar]

Currently there is no documentation on how to use primed profiles e.g. to run crawls with Addons or with some previous set of Cookies and Site Data.

[8-legged-elephant]

I was trying to run a crawl with the uBlock Origin extension and I am unable to get it working.

The steps I took were:

• Created a new firefox profile called 'uBO_profile'
• Opened a new instance of firefox using that profile
• Installed the uBlock Origin extension
• Closed all instances of firefox
• Located the profile directory and compressed it to a .tar file
• In the demo.py file included, I set display_mode='native' and added seed_tar=Path('path/to/profile.tar')

• Ran the crawl and did not see the extensions on the toolbar

This was done inside of a Linux mint VM.

One thing I noticed while trying to confirm that the profile was loaded is that the profile directory is created ( the uBO_profile ) inside of the firefox profile created in the tmp directory. But that may be intended.

[vringar]

I just remembered that we already wrote something on the topic.
See here.

It sounds to me like you tarred the profile directory instead of the contents of the profile directory.
That's why your profile is copied in a subfolder in the active profile instead overwriting the active profile.

[8-legged-elephant]

Okay, thanks for clarifying. I did not see the doc entry about profiles. I think it is because I do not have much experience with Firefox profiles, so I was looking for 'adding extensions' instead of 'adding profiles'.

I appreciate all the help.

[vringar]

No worries. I just had the feeling that I had already seen some docs for this. And then I found the solution to your error there.

I'll write up something explicitly mentioning add-ons

[MaazBinMusa]

@8-legged-elephant Did you try just installing the xpi with selenium's install_addon function in the deploy_firefox.py file?