Configure a FireFox Profile

This how-to guide explains how to access your development environment using the forward proxy running on c2d-rproxy1. It is strongly recommended to create a separate Firefox profile for this purpose. This setup will utilize the forward proxy created in the previous step Create the Reverse Proxy and Web Proxy.

Create a Profile

To keep your development environment separate from other profiles and your default browsing, it’s advisable to use a Firefox profile. On Ubuntu, you can launch the Firefox Profile Manager by using the following command:

firefox -no-remote -P

Alternatively, you can enter about:profiles in the address bar to access the Firefox Profile Manager.

Configure Network Settings

Once you have created a separate Firefox profile, open Firefox using that profile and configure the Network Settings as shown below:

Import the Root CA Certificate

In the View Certificates section, select Import and import the root CA certificate .ca/c2.crt. If you have used the clone script mentioned in Setup a Development Environment on Ubuntu 22 , you should find the certificate in the ~/git/gitlab/c2/ansible-dev/.ca/c2 folder.

Create a Launcher

For your convenience, you can create a separate launcher so that you don’t have to start Firefox from a terminal window. The following command will create a separate launcher named firefox-profile-manager.desktop for Firefox, with an additional menu option, Profile Manager, that executes the command firefox -no-remote -P.

curl https://gitlab.com/c2platform/ansible/-/raw/master/doc/howto-socks-proxy/firefox-profile-manager.desktop  --output /tmp/firefox-profile-manager.desktop && sudo desktop-file-install /tmp/firefox-profile-manager.desktop

Verify

Assuming you have created c2d-rproxy as per the previous steps outlined in Create the Reverse Proxy and Web Proxy , you should be able to navigate to https://c2platform.org/is-alive  . This should display the following message, and you shouldn’t encounter any security or certificate warnings since the certificate should be trusted:

Apache is alive