Private Relay

Private Relay provides generated email addresses to use in place of personal email addresses.

Recipients will still receive emails, but Private Relay keeps their personal email address from being harvested, and then bought, sold, traded, or combined with other data to personally identify, track, and/or target them.

Development

Please refer to our coding standards information for code styles, naming conventions and other methodologies.

Requirements

• python 3.7 (suggest using virtualenv)
• Postgres - even if you are using sqlite for development, requirements.txt installs psycopg2 which requires libpq. The following should work:
  • On Ubuntu: sudo apt install postgresql libpq-dev
  • On OSX: brew install postgresql libpq
  • On Fedora: sudo dnf install libpq-devel
• SES if you want to send real emails
• Node 12.X – Needed for front-end SCSS compiling
  • NPM
  • Gulp to compile SCSS

Install and Run the Site Locally

1. Clone and change to the directory:

   git clone https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay.git
   cd fx-private-relay

2. Create and activate a virtual environment:

   virtualenv env
   source env/bin/activate

3. Install Python and Node requirements:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

   npm install

4. Copy .env file for decouple config:

   cp .env-dist .env

5. Add a SECRET_KEY value to .env:

   SECRET_KEY=secret-key-should-be-different-for-every-install

6. Migrate DB:

   python manage.py migrate

7. Create superuser:

   python manage.py createsuperuser

8. Run it:

   python manage.py runserver

Recommended: Enable Firefox Accounts authentication

To enable Firefox Accounts authentication on your local server, you can use the "Firefox Private Relay local dev" OAuth app on accounts.stage.mozaws.net.

To do so:

1. Set ADMIN_ENABLED=True in your .env file

2. Go to the django admin page to change the default site.

3. Change example.com to 127.0.0.1:8000 and click Save.

4. Go to the django-allauth social app admin page, sign in with the superuser account you created above, and add a social app for Firefox Accounts:

Field	Value
Provider	Firefox Accounts
Name	accounts.stage.mozaws.net
Client id	9ebfe2c2f9ea3c58
Secret key	Request this from #fx-private-relay-eng Slack channel
Sites	127.0.0.1:8000 -> Chosen sites

Now you can sign into http://127.0.0.1:8000/ with an FxA.

⚠️ Remember that you'll need to use an account on https://accounts.stage.mozaws.net/, not the production site, accounts.firefox.com.

Optional: Install and run the add-on locally

Note: The add-on is located in a separate repo. See it for additional information on getting started.

The add-on adds Firefox UI to generate and auto-fill email addresses across the web. Running the add-on locally allows it to communicate with your local server (127.0.0.1:8000) instead of the production server (relay.firefox.com).

Production Environments

Requirements

In addition to the requirements for dev, production environments should use:

• PostgreSQL-compatible DB

Environment Variables

Production environments should also set some additional environment variables:

DATABASE_URL=postgresql://<username>:<password>@<host>:<port>/<database>
DJANGO_SECURE_HSTS_SECONDS=15768000
DJANGO_SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT=True