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linuxbashmacosfirefoxsudo

Get Firefox version as root

I have an installation script that I'd like to run on macOS/Linux.

Mid-installation, I need to detect the currently installed Firefox version to decide whether or not to use a deprecated feature (i.e. AutoConfig) versus a modern feature (i.e. policies.json).

  • For Windows, I have logic to parse the Firefox version from the registry. This works fine.
  • On macOS/Linux I want to parse the output of firefox --version however when firefox sees the script running as root it complains:

Running Firefox as root in a regular user's session is not supported. ($HOME is /Users/foo which is owned by foo.)

I can use sudo -u $USER firefox --version but this seems like it will have scalability issues with systems that don't have sudo enabled. Is there another way to get the version without launching the process as a regular user? Is there an undocumented override flag? I've tried --headless to no avail.

Solution

  • It appears the following is a viable workaround for running firefox --version as root.

    HOME=/tmp XAUTHORITY=/tmp firefox --version

    As far as I know, /tmp should always be owned by root, but if there are exceptions, please propose a better path so that this solution can be improved.