Install all your Firefox plugins in one step

If you are like me and have many Firefox plugins you will know how much of a pain it can be when you need to install them all onto another computer. I recently was doing this on a number of computers and decided to find a better way to install my favourite plugins.

What I found was a way to package all your plugins into one file. You then install this package like a normal plugin but instead of installing one plugin, you have installed all of your favourite plugins.

This can be done by installing the following plugins created by Chuck Baker :

1. FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension)
2. CLEO (Compact Library Extension Organizer)

You must install FEBE before CLEO. If you do not, it will appear that CLEO has installed successfully but the menu options for it will not appear.

To create your install package you first backup your plugins using FEBE and then process the backup into a package using CLEO.

Backing up your extensions

First setup an FEBE  backup directory:

1. Go to Tools, FEBE, FEBE Options
2. Enter in your backup directory

Then perform a backup:

1. Go to Tools, FEBE, Perform backup

FEBE will now perform backup of you Firefox extensions into the directory you set earlier.

CLEO

To create an installation package of all your plugins we now use CLEO. We first setup a destination directory:

1. Go to tools, FEBE, CLEO, CLEO options
2. Enter your Cleopack destination directory

We now create our package:

1. Go to tools, FEBE, CLEO, Create cleopack
2. Enter a name for you package, this will be the name of your file, i.e. “myplugins”
3. Select items to package, this shows the FEBE backup directory with all of your plugins as separate files, you can select them all or only ones you want to package
4. Click on “Auto-generate” and allow CLEO to create a description for you
5. Finally select “Create cleopack”

You will now find an “xpi” file with the name you set in the Cleopack destination directory.

This package can then be installed on any Firefox. You can do this by clicking the file open or in Firefox go to “File” and “Open File” and select the package.

Upgrades

As I have only just done this myself I do not know this for sure but it is my hope that if all of the plugins have updated since I have last created a package that they will still install and then find the latest updates automatically.