Smoothwall Firewall project

Friday 26 June 2009

Chromium browser config files in Linux

After looking for some time , and poking around in the bug/discussion forums I have found where currently Chromium stores it's variable information, information like stored cookies,url history and option settings. It can be found in your home directory under .config - the full stop shows it to be a hidden directory in *nix. Under there you will find chromium and google-chrome, if you have installed both. In the lower directories you will find a selection of sqlite, JSON and text files which are all very obviously named. This is very useful during my testing to check the database configs and what xml/sql is being written out. It has also given me a chance to get better acquainted with sqlite, which is a great embedded database tool, and worth the effort to learn.

Why there is no .chromium directory is not obvious, but I'm sure there is a reason. Firefox very neatly stores all it's workings under the .mozilla directory, using the same techniques and that works well.

Chromium also uses the .pki/nssdb directory for it's secure certificate storage if you need to have a look at those. After reading several post's it would appear that there is an attempt for the projects to share this database, but time will tell.

There is more information here:

Chromium.org

3 comments:

Unknown said...

.chromium is already used by Chromium BSU http://www.reptilelabour.com/software/chromium/ and we obey XDG_CONFIG_HOME as per the spec http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/0.6/ar01s02.html

Codfather said...

Cheers Evan, thanks for the update, well that explains the change of directory name.

Nick

Unknown said...

Chromium is following the xdg specifications (http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html).
Those are the same that define that your desktop is called "Desktop". You can find some of them by doing "cat ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs".

If the user doesn't change the default values, the general idea is this:
- configuration files go under ~/.config/
- internal data go under ~/.local/share/
- caches go in ~/.cache/

Firefox is older than chrome, and they never bothered to move their directories to follow the new specifications, probably to avoid the "where-the-hell-my-files-have-gone" from all its users :-D