View source for Development:Using Custom Profiles

When developing, debugging certain issues, or testing, you may find it helpful to run Camino with a custom profile, either to facilitate testing/debugging specific scenarios or to simply allow you to continue running your daily-use Camino while working. There are several methods available that allow you to launch another Camino at the same time as your daily-use Camino and/or protect your daily-use profile from development builds.  Some methods may be more useful in certain situations than others.

'''N.B''' Note that none of these methods currently handle the <code>org.mozilla.camino.plist</code>, which stores settings related to our Cocoa UI; both builds will read the file into memory (and write to it occasionally), and the last build to quit will win and stomp other changes written to the file previously.

===Troubleshoot Camino===

A quick and easy way to test your changes without affecting your daily-use profile (or getting the dreaded "Another copy of Camino is already running" alert) is to use [http://pimpmycamino.com/parts/troubleshoot-camino Troubleshoot Camino].  Simply drag the built Camino application (from <code>$objdir/camino/build/Debug/</code> or <code>$objdir/dist/</code>) to Troubleshoot Camino and you’re off.

Or, you can launch on Troubleshoot Camino like a regular application, and it will show an Open dialogue and let you choose a copy of Camino to launch; the tool will also remember the path to the last Camino you selected, making a second run require fewer clicks.

Note that Troubleshoot Camino always creates a temporary fresh profile, so if you need to persist any profile data, you will need to use another method.

===Xcode===

If you work mostly in Xcode, you can set the same environment variable that Troubleshoot Camino uses; then, any time you launch your (debug) Camino via Xcode, it will use profile location you’ve specified.

# From Xcode’s Project menu, choose “Edit Active Executable ‘CaminoApp’”
# In the Arguments tab, click the “+” button underneath the ”Variables to be set in the environment” table.
# In the “Name” column, type <code>CAMINO_PROFILE_DIR</code>, and in the “Value” column, provide the path to the location where you would like to store the profile for your development build.
# To run, click “Build & Go” in the toolbar.

===Terminal===

====Environment variable====
In the Terminal, you can set the same environment variable that Troubleshoot Camino uses:
:<code>export CAMINO_PROFILE_DIR="AbsolutePathToDesiredProfileFolder"; open /path/to/Camino.app</code>

If you simply export the variable, any future launch of Camino from that terminal will use the specified profile location.

====Command-line argument====

Camino also supports the <code>-profile</code> command-line argument.  This option is useful for running Gecko tests, e.g. [[Development:Testing_arbitrary_scenarios_with_Mochitest|Mochitest]], and also for [[QA:Release_Testing:l10n|localization testing]] and debugging with <code>gdb</code>.

To use this method, use the full path to the Camino binary followed by the <code>-profile</code> argument with the full path to the desired profile location:

:<code>/path/to/Camino.app/Contents/MacOS/Camino -profile /full/path/to/desired/profile/location</code>

<code>gdb</code> example:

:<code>gdb /path/to/Camino.app/Contents/MacOS/Camino<br>break [http://mxr.mozilla.org/camino/source/camino/src/application/MainController.mm#950 MainController.mm:950]<br>run -profile /full/path/to/desired/profile/location</code>

===<code>Info.plist</code>===

Somewhat similar to the Xcode method above, you can set a custom profile by changing the value of the <code>mozProfileDir</code> key in your Camino build’s <code>Info.plist</code>.  Specify a custom name (e.g., <code>CaminoDebug</code>) and Camino will use <code>~/Library/Application Support/CustomName</code> for the profile when launched.

'''N.B.''' Because the <code>Info.plist</code> is regenerated periodically (every time Camino is rebuilt following a pull of new Camino code from the repository, every time Camino is rebuilt following a Gecko build ID change, and any time there are changes made to the <code>Info.plist</code> itself), the above change will have to be repeated often.