How to sync Greasemonkey scripts between computers using Dropbox

Read the hebrew version here

I use Greasemonkey a lot. It’s a very useful tool indeed. I am, however, missing an important feature to sync Greasemonkey scripts between computers, something like what Foxmarks is doing with bookmarks (and they already said they are thinking about adding greasemonkey support). Until such a feature will be implemented officially, I decided to make one myself.

Since I need support for both Linux and Windows XP, I chose to use Dropbox, which syncs between folders on your computer with extreme ease.

On Windows XP

Download and install the Dropbox client. If this is the first time you are using Dropbox, you will have to register first using the installation wizard. It’s really simple. When you’re done, you should see a new folder under My Documents called My Dropbox.

Locate you Firefox profile folder (usually C:Documents and Settings<User>Application DataMozillaFirefoxProfiles<Profile>) and move the folder gm_scripts from there to the new My Dropbox folder.

Then, download Junction and extract junction.exe somewhere you can find it (I prefer c:windows, since it’s always in your PATH variable). Now open a command prompt (Start > Run > cmd) and type:

junction C:Documents and Settings<User>Application DataMozillaFirefoxProfiles<Profile>gm_scripts C:Documents and Settings<User>My DocumentsMy Dropboxgm_scripts

This will link your Greasemonkey scripts folder to the new Dropbox folder. Note that this is not a copy of the original folder, but a link to it (read more here).

Now all you have to do is restart Firefox and it will read the Greasemonkey scripts from your Dropbox shared folder!

On Linux

Download and install the Dropbox client. Since I use KDE and not Gnome I followed these alternative instruction. They are pretty simple to understand.

After the installation has finished, run the following commands:

$ mv ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles/<Profile>/gm_scripts/ ~Dropbox
$ ln -s ~/Dropbox/gm_scripts/ ~/.mozilla/firefox/profiles/<Profile>/gm_scripts/

Just don’t forget to use your actual Firefox profile, of course.

Restart Firefox and you’re good to go!

Note

After installing a new script on one computer, you will need to restart Firefox on the others to refresh the scripts list.

You can also sync other Firefox properties, such as cookies, bookmarks and history, by sharing .sqlite files under your profile dir, but I haven’t tried it yet so I can’t recommend it.