Thunderbird Enterprise Policy Documentation Generator

This project automates the generation of Thunderbird’s enterprise policy documentation. It also monitors changes in Mozilla’s upstream policy templates and can create GitHub issues for any new or updated policies that may need to be ported to Thunderbird.

The generated end-user documentation is available here: https://thunderbird.github.io/policy-templates/

📋 Features

• Documentation Generation
  Builds documentation (README files and PLIST files, not yet ADMX files) for different Thunderbird versions:

  • ESR (Extended Support Release)
  • Release
  • Daily

• Change Detection
  Monitors Mozilla’s policy-templates repository and the policies-schema.json file to detect:

  • Newly added or removed policies
  • Changes to policy attributes
  • Updates to policy documentation

• GitHub Integration
  Automatically generates GitHub issues for policy changes that need to be reviewed or ported to Thunderbird (when run via a GitHub Action).

📁 Project Structure

├── config/                # YAML config files for the policy documentation per
│                          # Thunderbird version (will be moved into comm-central soon).
├── docs/                  # The generated documentation. Can be used directly
│                          # as a GitHub Page.
├── upstream/              # Stores last-known upstream revision states, used to
│                          # identify changes since the last time the script run.
└── generator/             # Source folder for the generator script.

🛠️ Setup & Usage

📦 Requirements

• Node.js 18+

🚀 Installation

Before running the script, install the required Node.js dependencies:

cd generator
npm install

▶️ Run the Script

To execute the policy generation and update process:

node update_policy_templates.js

This script can also be integrated into a CI workflow, such as GitHub Actions, to automate the generation and monitoring of policy templates.

🧠 Notes

• Policies defined in the YAML files that are not supported by Thunderbird are excluded from the generated outputs.
• The script only reports changes that occurred since the last known revision. Revision state is stored in the upstream/ directory.
• YAML config files follow a defined schema for policy metadata. Refer to the format guide at the top of each YAML file for details.

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the MPL 2.0.