How to install firefox on QNAP nas?

This article talks about how to install firefox on QNAP with Container Station, and access the service from the external network.

TABLE OF CONTENT

• Why do you need to install browser on QNAP
• Introduce linuxserver/firefox
• Access your browser service
• Expose the browser service to the external network
• Kind reminder

Why do you need to install browser on QNAP

In the local area network, we can easily access the corresponding services through the ip of the local area network device, such as the router device, the home NAS, etc., but once we leave the house, it becomes very difficult to access these services. In my last article, Jeager introduced how to access the NAS management page on the external network. You can use the same method to configure port forwarding for all intranet services and publish them to the external network, but this is not only cumbersome but also very danger.

If we can only expose a simple browser service to the external network, then all devices can be accessed as if they were on a local LAN. Next, I will teach you how to install a docker-based browser service on QNAP.

Step #1: Install linuxserver/firefox on QNAP from Container Station

The name of the docker application we need to install is linuxserver/firefox, which is a docker application including Firefox compiled based on Alpine. Of course, you can also search for other browser docker applications at https://hub.docker.com.

Paste the following code into Container Station->Create->Create Application. Remember to replace /share/Container/firefox with your local directory.

version: "3"
services:
  firefox:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/firefox:latest
    container_name: firefox
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Europe/London
    volumes:
      - /share/Container/firefox:/config
    ports:
      - 3010:3000
    shm_size: "1gb"
    restart: unless-stopped

• /share/Container/firefox will place the configuration file and download directory of the firefox browser
• ports, we forward the 3000 port inside the container to the 3010 port of the NAS, because our 3000 port is already occupied by grafana.

Step #2: Access your browser in LAN

Use the LAN ip of the NAS plus port 3010 (http://192.168.1.12:3010) to access the firefox service, as shown in the following figure. What an odd status quo, browser within browser.

Step #3: Expose the browser service to the external network

Configure port forwarding in the router configuration background to expose port 3010 to the external network. Now you can access firefox service with https://[domain_name].myqnapcloud.com:3010.

You can find how to do port forwarding in this post.

Kind reminder

This is not a secure way because anyone can access your intranet through the url https://[domain_name].myqnapcloud.com:3010. In a later article, I will introduce how to build a more secure VPN tunnel to access the intranet.