After switching from Firefox to LibreWolf, I became interested in the idea of self-hosting my own Firefox Sync server.
Although I had seen this was possible before, I had never really looked into it—until now. I embarked on a journey to
set this up, and while it wasn’t completely smooth sailing, I eventually got it working. Here’s how it went.

Finding the Right Sync Server

Initial Search: Mozilla’s Sync Server Repo

I started by searching for “firefox sync server github” and quickly
found Mozilla’s syncserver repo. This is an all-in-one package
designed for self-hosting a Firefox Sync server. It bundles both the tokenserver for authentication and syncstorage for
storage, which sounded like exactly what I needed.

However, there were two red flags:

1. The repository had “failed” tags in the build history.
2. A warning was prominently displayed stating that the repository was no longer being maintained and pointing to a new
   project in Rust.

Switching to Rust: syncstorage-rs

With that in mind, I followed the link to syncstorage-rs, which is
a modern, Rust-based version of the original project. It seemed like the more viable option, so I decided to move
forward with this one. But first, I wanted to check if there was a ready-to-go Docker image to make deployment easier.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t one, but the documentation did mention running it with Docker.

This is where things started to get complicated.

Diving Into Docker: Confusion and Complexity

Documentation Woes

The Docker documentation had some strange parts. For example, it mentioned:

• Ensuring that grpcio and protobuf versions matched the versions used by google-cloud-rust-raw. This sounded
  odd—shouldn’t Docker handle version dependencies automatically?
• Another confusing part was the instruction to manually copy the contents of mozilla-rust-sdk into the top-level root
  directory. Again, why wasn’t this step automated in the Dockerfile?

At this point, I was feeling a bit uneasy but decided to push forward. I reviewed the repo, the Dockerfile, the
Makefile, and the circleci workflows. Despite all that, I was still unsure how to proceed.

A Simpler Solution: syncstorage-rs-docker

I then stumbled upon dan-r’s syncstorage-rs-docker repo, which had a
much simpler Docker setup. The description explained that the author had also encountered issues with the
original documentation and decided to create a Docker container for their own infrastructure.

At this point, I felt reassured that I wasn’t alone in my confusion, and decided to give this setup a try.

Setting Up the Server: Docker Compose and MariaDB

Docker