In this article I will show you how to set up a Firefox Sync Server as a Docker container. In my case this will replace iCloud Bookmark / Tab synchronization. This article is part of the byeCloud series in which I try to replace iCloud with self-hosted services.

I’ve evaluated different solutions to synchronize tabs and bookmarks, but none of them seemed to satisfy my needs. Firefox Sync almost does. Originally, I wanted to use Chromium with some plugin that would allow me to self-host a bookmark sync service. While there is a working solution called Unmark which also has a Chrome extension that works in general, the open source version lacks HTML bookmark import functionality and seems not to be the best possible software quality after a quick review (in fact I implemented a HTML bookmark to Unmark JSON converter to import my bookmarks but even their JSON import code drove me crazy).

For some months now I’m running a private GitLab server. I really enjoy using it, especially with all the great features like the Docker Container Registry and GitLab Pages to host static pages, even with own domains. Normally I would prefer a more lightweight solution, such as Gitea but GitLab has so many advantages that, at least for me, this is currently the only way to go. However, it felt tedious setting it up, even with Docker. You have to configure GitLab to serve stuff using plain HTTP, provide different ports for different apps to be able to create own vhosts in the reverse proxy and so on. So I decided to quickly write up what I did to get it working. Maybe I’m wrong and there’s a much easier way to do it but I couldn’t find it. Additionally, in the meanwhile I switched from Caddy as a reverse proxy to Traefik since it can attach directly to the Docker daemon, listens to changes in the domain configuration, request new HTTPS certificates on the fly while new containers are spawned and - best of all - I don’t need a separate configuration file. So the guide this time is still using Docker and docker-compose, but Traefik instead of Caddy. But you can basically use any reverse proxy to set it up, like nginx-proxy.