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Mozilla VPN

One tap to privacy Surf, stream, game, and get work done while maintaining your privacy online. Whether you’re traveling, using public WiFi, or simply looking for more online security, we will always put your privacy first.

See: https://vpn.mozilla.org

Getting Involved

We encourage you to participate in this open source project. We love Pull Requests, Bug Reports, ideas, (security) code reviews, or any other kind of positive contribution.

Before you attempt to make a contribution please read the Community Participation Guidelines.

Here are some useful links to start:

Building the Client

Moved here -> Dev-Setup

Pre-commit formatting hook

If you want to submit a pull-request, please, install the clang format pre-commit hook that lints code.

  1. The standard conda environment includes the required clang-format libraries. If the conda environment is not being used, a clang-format library will need to manually installed. (For example, using Homebrew on macOS: brew install clang-format.)

  2. The linter will need to know where to find the clang-format-diff.py file, so CLANG_FORMAT_DIFF must be exported. On a standard conda installation: export CLANG_FORMAT_DIFF=$(find ~/miniconda3/pkgs -name clang-format-diff.py)

  3. Install the pre-commit hook: ./scripts/git-pre-commit-format install

Testing

Unit tests

When built for any one of the desktop platforms, this project will also generate a suite of unit tests.

The tests are built manually specifying the build_tests target.

cmake --build build --target build_tests -j $(nproc)

Once built, you can run them with ctest as follows:

ctest --test-dir build -j $(nproc) --output-on-failure

Running the functional tests

To run the tests, we must set the MVPN_BIN environment variable and point it to the Mozilla VPN binary.

# Linux:
export MVPN_BIN=$(pwd)/build/mozillavpn
# macOS:
export MVPN_BIN=$(pwd)/build/src/Mozilla\ VPN.app/Contents/MacOS/Mozilla\ VPN
# Others:
export MVPN_BIN=$(pwd)/build/src/mozillavpn

The functional tests also require the testing addons to be built. This sub project can be found at tests/functional/addons and can be built as follows:

cmake -B build-addons/ -S tests/functional/addons
cmake --build build-addons/
export MVPN_ADDONS_PATH=build-addons/

Other dependencies:

export PATH=$PATH:~/Qt/6.6.3/macos/bin:$PATH
export QT_MACOS_BIN=~/Qt/6.6.3/macos/bin
MVPN_API_BASE_URL=http://localhost:5000
ARTIFACT_DIR=tests/artifact

To run a test: from the root of the project: npm run functionalTest path/to/testFile.js. To run, say, the authentication tests: npm run functionalTest tests/functional/testAuthenticationInApp.js.

(Functional tests are run against the production build of the application by providing the --testing flag to the command line when running the app. This option switches the client in to staging mode, and enables mocking for platform and backend features necessary to facilitate automated testing. This flag is added automatically when setupVpn.js starts the VPN, which is done for all functional tests.)

Developer Options and staging environment

To enable the staging environment, open the Help window, and click on the Help title text 6 times within 10 seconds to unlock the Developer Options menu. On this menu, you can enable on the Staging Server checkbox to switch to the staging environment. A full restart of the VPN will be required for this option to take effect.

Inspector

The inspector is a debugging tool available only when the staging environment is activated. When running MozillaVPN, go to the inspector page to interact with the app. Connect the inspector to the app using the web-socket interface. On desktop, use ws://localhost:8765.

The inspector offers a number of tools to help debug and navigate through the VPN client:

inspector_snapshot

Glean

Glean is a Mozilla analytics & telemetry solution that provides a consistent experience and behavior across all of Mozilla products.

When the client is in staging mode, pings will have the app channel set to staging. This allows for filtering between staging and production pings through the client_info.app_channel metric present in all pings.

Debug tooling

Glean provides a series of debug APIs to aid developers and testers in verifying Glean metrics.

These APIs can be accessed through the Mozilla VPN developer menu, under "Telemetry Debugging".

Data review

If you are responsible for a piece of work that adds new Glean instrumentation you will need to do a data review. Following is the recommended process along with some pointers.

The data review process is also described here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Data_Collection

The basic process is this:

Note:

Status

Unit Tests Lottie Tests Linters (clang, l10n) Linux Packages WebAssembly

Footnotes

  1. The data-review questionnaire can be found at https://github.com/mozilla/data-review/blob/main/request.md. That can be copy pasted and filled out manually. However, since the VPN application uses Glean for data collection developers can also use the glean_parser data-review command, which generates a mostly filled out data-review questionnaire for Glean users. The questionnaire can seem quite intimidating, but don't panic. First, look at an old data-review such as https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/mozilla-vpn-client/pull/4594. Questions 1, 2, 3 an 10 are the ones that require most of your attention and thought. If you don't know the answers to these questions, reach out to Sarah Bird or the product manager so you can answer these with full confidence.

  2. Feel free to ping any of the data-stewards. If the collection is time sensitive consider pinging all data-stewards directly on the data-stewards matrix channel.