Using Profiler without internet

[Delengowski]

Hello,

I discovered functiontrace and wanted to use it on the air gapped system at my work. I misunderstood what the firefox profiler was. I believed the firefox profiler to be built into firefox itself. I did not realize it was a web app that someone would navigate to.

My question is, is it possible to standup the firefox profiler stand-alone, as in locally without the need for internet? Particularly I was worried about the firefox-profiler-server which states it needs a Google Cloud Storage and Bitly accounts to run.

Is the profiler-server required to run the profiler locally? Can the profiler be ran locally on an air gapped system?

[julienw]

Hey @Delengowski and thanks for your question!

The server and GCS and bitly are only used if you use the "upload" feature of firefox. Otherwise the profiler UI is just some static files that can be served from any web server.
We even use a service worker so that after the first use, all files are cached locally in your browser and you don't even need internet access itself at that point. The browser then regularly checks for updates but they aren't needed if you don't need the new features or the file format you're consuming doesn't change.

Hope this clears up things, please ask if you have any more follow-up questions!

[janaknat]

@julienw Is it possible to create the profiler UI as static files and run without any web server? In #3764, @mstange mentions running yarn build-prod which generates static files. There are instructions to serve these files with nginx. We have a use-case where we can have no access to the internet or run any web server. We're looking to integrate this view to https://github.com/aws/aperf.