Kinto Integration in Firefox

Kinto is a simple JSON storage service that was integrated into Firefox, and currently used for RemoteSettings.

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

It used be supporting more use-cases in the past. See also Kinto at Mozilla

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

• Remote Settings docs
• The History of Remote Settings
• Kinto at Mozilla (blog post) -- see also the published version, no longer available at its initial location

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