Automated Mozilla profile creation

Automated Mozilla profile creation on Linux/UNIX

I am a sysadmin at a company and often when new people start I need to help them configure Mozilla under Linux. There are usually couple steps that need to be undertaken ie.

Create a mail account to point to our IMAP and SMTP servers
Set IMAP to use SSL instead of being plain-text
Tell SMTP not to use my username when connecting to the SMTP server
Set user up to use the LDAP addressbook ie. host=directory.company.com, search base=ou=users,o=company,c=US
Set their homepage to point to our intranet page ie. http://intranet.company.com/
Activate pop-up ad blocking
Install Googlebar from googlebar.mozdev.org available only for a single user not all users. This is very important since this will install the googlebar in the users profile instead of Mozilla binary directory
Other things

Although this is not a huge time drain I figured there should be a better way to do this. Since most of the Mozilla configuration files are text files I thought I could probably easily do it. Unfortunately that was not so :-(. It took me a while to figure it out.

I did following to get it going

I created a test account called testuser so that I can avoid messing up my Mozilla configuration
I launched mozilla as the testuser
I did steps 1. through 8. as described above
I quit mozilla
If I looked in my .mozilla directory there were two files appreg and pluginreg.dat and a directory default with a subdirectory c91070cl.slt which had all my preferences and configuration files
I then tar.gzed the $HOME/.mozilla directory ie.

tar -zcvf mozillaprofile.tgz $HOME/.mozilla

Now when I need to configure Mozilla for a user all I need to do is type

configure_mozilla.sh jdoe "Joe Doe"

First argument is users' userid and second their full name. My configure_mozilla.sh looks like this

#!/bin/bash

# Location of the gziped Mozilla profile 
MOZILLAPROFILE=/nfs/config/mozilla/mozillaprofile.tgz

cd $HOME

tar -zxvf ${MOZILLAPROFILE}

perl -pi -e "s/testuser/${1}/g" $HOME/.mozilla/appreg

perl -pi -e "s/testuser/${1}/g" $HOME/.mozilla/default/c91070cl.slt/prefs.js
perl -pi -e "s/testuser/${1}/g" $HOME/.mozilla/default/c91070cl.slt/prefs.bak
perl -pi -e "s/testuser/${1}/g" $HOME/.mozilla/default/c91070cl.slt/panacea.dat

perl -pi -e "s/FULLNAME/${2}/g" $HOME/.mozilla/default/c91070cl.slt/prefs.js

perl -pi -e "s/testuser/${1}/g" $HOME/.mozilla/default/c91070cl.slt/chrome/chrome.rdf

Hope this helps you. Please e-mail me if you have any additions.

Vladimir Vuksan vuksan-php@veus.hr