QA/Telemetry/Installing Staging Server

< QA‎ | Telemetry

Quick Summary

The following document will guide users on how to install and setup a telemetry experiment staging server on the local machine. Once the staging server is installed, Firefox will be able to contact the server and install the current experiment.

Here are two ways of checking to see if an experiment has been installed:

  • Checking "about:addons" - You should see an "Experiments" category being listed
  • Checking "about:support" - Will list the active experiments under "Experimental Features"

Quick Notes:

  • This guide assumes that you're using either OSX or Linux. Trying to get the server working on Windows is just a pain.
  • This can also be installed on a cloud instance and doesn't necessarily have to be installed locally. I personally have a telemetry experiment installed on a Digital Ocean linux instance that I use as my main testing server.

Setup

Note: Installing a development environment is out of the scope for this guide so please consult the MDN documentation if you run into any issues)

  • Clone the telemetry experiment server using the following command:
  • Once cloned, a directory named telemetry-experiment-server should have been created
  • Switch into the telemetry-experiment-server directory
  • Checkout the latest branch using the following command:
    • hg checkout <branch #>
      • Example: hg checkout 42b785b60c60
  • Once you've checked out the latest branch, will need to install genshi as it's a prerequisite for building our local server
  • To install genshi simply type pip install Genshi in the terminal and follow the onscreen directions