Firefox configuration via CLI

Question

During system setup and later for automatic testing (whether specific configuration settings are still effective) I am interested in configuring Firefox via CLI. I have seen one or the other command line tool but they would always cover only one aspect of Firefox and are usually bound to a specific version.

To be more clear about this, let me list some of the use cases for the CLI:

• create/remove profiles
• install/update/remove plugins
• list installed plugins incl version
• list configuration settings, get/set values (also for plugins)
• clear cache/cookies/...
• manage truststore
• manage bookmarks

Is there no command line interface officially supported?

Answer 1

Firefox command line interface is indeed officially supported, but at this moment in time is under documented. While it's possible to find some outdated documentation, the in-tree documentation is only a stub.

Since you mentioned automated testing, you might also consider the approach currently being used by Mozilla to run tests on Firefox:

1. Generate a profile to be used for testing.
2. Tweak the preferences in the profile (e.g. using user.js).
3. Start Firefox using the generated profile (either using -p or --profile).
4. Execute your tests (with Geckodriver?).