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Deploying uBlock Origin

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gwarser edited this page Jun 28, 2018 · 41 revisions

I do not know much about that administrator stuff, so I will let a knowledgeable person guide you:

Customizing the settings

Administrators can force specific configurations to deployed uBlock Origin ("uBO"). At launch time, uBO will look for a setting named adminSettings, and if it exists, it will parse, extract and overwrite a user's settings with the administrator-assigned ones.

For Firefox, refer to Mozilla documentation about "Native manifests" (sections about "Managed storage manifests" and its location). You can also consult this specific comment in uBO issue tracker.

For Firefox-legacy, the adminSettings entry must be added to about:config, the key name is extensions.ublock0.adminSettings, and the value is a plain string -- which must be JSON-parseable.

For Chrome, adminSettings must be an entry part of the policy for the extension. See http://www.chromium.org/administrators/configuring-policy-for-extensions.

This is still a work in progress, there are limitations. For example, it is not possible to merge an admin's settings with the user's ones -- a setting can only be overwritten. Hopefully I will address this limitation eventually, as time permit. (See https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/832#issuecomment-248138558).

The content of adminSettings is pretty straightforward: configure uBO as you wish for your users, then create a backup using the "Backup to file" in the Settings pane. Now open this backup file using a text editor, and remove all entries you do not want to overwrite, while taking care to end up with a valid JSON file (mind trailing commas, etc.). All the entries left are the ones which will be overwritten on the user's side.

An example, I created a backup file after having customized uBO, and removed everything except for the "Color-blind friendly" setting, to force that setting to be set on the user's side. Resulting text file:

{
  "userSettings": {
    "colorBlindFriendly": true
  }
}

Now, the value for adminSettings must itself be a plain string, and this means we need to encode the above text into a string, using JSON.stringify. Here is a small utility to help you deal with this step: http://raymondhill.net/ublock/adminSetting.html.

Further readings

Here are issues related to the customization of settings for deployed uBO, there might be advises in there which you may find useful:

uBlock Origin - An efficient blocker for Chromium and Firefox. Fast and lean.

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