Loading into remote firefox instances via web-ext run

[the8472]

Is this a bug or feature request?

feature request

What is the expected or desired behavior?

web-ext run should be able to attach to a remote (different machine/VM/container) firefox instance, Something like web-ext run --remote-firefox=X.X.X.X:YYYY

see also: #518

[filipesperandio]

In my case, I run everything that depends on node_modules inside a Docker container. It would be great if I could also run web-ext from there an point at my host Firefox instance.

[kumar303]

It looks like we'll need this upstream fix before we can let web-ext connect to a specific host: https://github.com/mozilla/node-firefox-connect/issues/4

[lbfalvy]

Is there any news on this? As far as I can tell node-firefox-connect is no longer a direct dependency, so does @kumar303 's assertion still stand?

[Rob--W]

The relevant logic is now part of web-ext itself, at https://github.com/mozilla/web-ext/blob/666886f40a967b515d43cf38fc9aec67ad744d89/src/firefox/remote.js (and https://github.com/mozilla/web-ext/blob/666886f40a967b515d43cf38fc9aec67ad744d89/src/firefox/rdp-client.js for the logic that connects via the remote debugging protocol).

It does still not support the ability to connect to an arbitrary host (other than the default 127.0.0.1). But even if it did, then we would still not be able to install an add-on on a remote machine, because the installation mechanism requires a file path, and the file path would be a path to a local file instead of the remote host: https://github.com/mozilla/web-ext/blob/666886f40a967b515d43cf38fc9aec67ad744d89/src/firefox/remote.js#L139-L143

Supporting this use case is a non-trivial amount of work.

[HMaker]

@Rob--W is there any documentation about RDP protocol? it doesn't look like webdriver neither CDP (chrome).