Install the latest Firefox securely in Debian

May 2, 2019

Update: There’s an official APT repository

Since Debian does not provide an easy way to install the latest version of Firefox, I’ve written a script to install the latest official binary from Mozilla.

To make the process as secure as possible, the relevant binary is downloaded and its checksum is verified against the published checksum by Mozilla. The digital signature of the checksum file is also verified using Mozilla’s GPG key.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

trap exit INT

if [[ -n $(pgrep firefox) ]]; then
  echo 'error: Firefox is running'
  exit 1
fi

target_version=$(
  wget -qS --spider https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/notes/ 2>&1 | \
    grep -i location: | \
    cut -d / -f 4
)

if [[ -z "$target_version" ]]; then
  echo 'error: Failed to parse latest Firefox release version'
  exit 2
fi

mozilla_key=BBBEBDBB24C6F355
platform=linux-x86_64locale=en-USbase_name=firefox-$target_version.tar.bz2
file_name=$platform/$locale/$base_name
base_url=https://releases.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/$target_version
tmp_dir=/tmp/firefox-update-$target_version

rm -rf $tmp_dir
mkdir $tmp_dir
pushd $tmp_dir

wget $base_url/SHA512SUMS $base_url/SHA512SUMS.asc

gpg --recv-keys $mozilla_key && gpg --verify SHA512SUMS.asc SHA512SUMS

if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then
  echo 'error: Failed to verify signature for SHA512SUMS'
  exit 3
fi

wget $base_url/$file_name

expected_sum=$(grep $file_name SHA512SUMS | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | sed "s/^b'\|'$//g")
echo "$expected_sum  $base_name" | sha512sum -c -

if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then
  echo "error: Invalid checksum for $base_name"
  exit 4
fi

sudo rm -rf /opt/firefox

pushd /optsudo tar -xvjf $tmp_dir/$base_name
popd

popd
rm -rf $tmp_dir

Things to note:

Platform is x86_64 (configurable)
Locale is en-US (configurable)
Installation path is /opt/firefox/