flatpak_firefox_1password.md

Hacking the flatpak isolation to get native host messaging with Firefox

Source

This is not my work, but I wanted to share it here because it's a great hack. I found it on this 1Password forum thread. The original author is Sn0wCrack.

Remarks

This is a hack, and it's not recommended to do this on a system where flatpak sandboxing is desired.

I will use the org.mozilla.firefox flatpak as an example, but this should work with any flatpak packaged firefox, I have only tried with the official package.

Instructions

1. Add org.freedesktop.Flatpak to the System Bus Talks.

   flatpak override --user --talk-name=org.freedesktop.Flatpak org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly

2. Create the global 1Password configuration directory.

   sudo mkdir -p /etc/1password

3. Add flatpak-session-helper as an allowed browser.

   echo "flatpak-session-helper" | sudo tee /etc/1password/custom_allowed_browsers

4. Create a 1Password helper in Firefox's flatpak.

   We will create a wrapper script that will call the 1Password Browser Support binary with the flatpak-spawn --host command.

   mkdir -p ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly/data/bin
   echo -e "#!/bin/bash\n\nflatpak-spawn --host /opt/1Password/1Password-BrowserSupport \"\$@\"" | tee ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly/data/bin/1password-wrapper.sh
   chmod +x ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly/data/bin/1password-wrapper.sh

5. Allow Native Host Messaging for the 1Password extension.

   mkdir -p ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly/.mozilla/native-messaging-hosts
   echo '{
       "name": "com.1password.1password",
       "description": "1Password BrowserSupport",
       "path": "/home/$USER/.var/app/org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly/data/bin/1password-wrapper.sh",
       "type": "stdio",
       "allowed_extensions": [
           "{0a75d802-9aed-41e7-8daa-24c067386e82}",
           "{25fc87fa-4d31-4fee-b5c1-c32a7844c063}",
           "{d634138d-c276-4fc8-924b-40a0ea21d284}"
       ]
   }' | envsubst | tee ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.FirefoxNightly/.mozilla/native-messaging-hosts/com.1password.1password.json

6. Restart Firefox and 1Password.

7. Profit!