Use web-ext to run an extension in Google Chrome

[kumar303]

Is this a bug or feature request?

feature

What is the current behavior?

You can use web-ext run to launch an extension for development in Firefox. It creates a temporary profile and will automatically reload the extension when you change the source.

What is the expected or desired behavior?

It would be great to use web-ext to launch the extension like this in Chrome. I'm not sure if we can support auto-reloading or temporary profiles but at the very least we could launch chromium --load-extension=/path/to/source-dir which does a similar temporary installation for development.

[kumar303]

If Chrome doesn't have remote debugger support for auto-reloading, here is one idea for an epic, horrendous hack:

• create a helper Chrome Extension that can listen to commands from web-ext
• install the helper extension along with the extension under test
• whenever the source changes, web-ext would tell the Chrome Extension to automatically click the 'reload' button on the chrome://extensions/ page (Extensions may not have access to run content scripts on this page though)

[AgrimPrasad]

Hacky idea for auto-reloading which was previously implemented for Chrome: https://60devs.com/hot-reloading-for-chrome-extensions.html

Source: https://github.com/xpl/crx-hotreload/blob/master/hot-reload.js

[kumar303]

Wow, that's cool. Thanks for the link. I guess the downside is that one would have to modify their extension source to use this approach.

[josephfrazier]

For OctoLinker, we use chrome-launch to start an isolated instance of Chrome with the extension loaded. Here's the code, if you're interested in adapting it: https://github.com/OctoLinker/browser-extension/blob/08bd7aebe3fc43c96690c2ca0dab14398810c424/scripts/chrome-launch.js

[lutostag]

Chrome (well a symlink to chromium on my rig) does reload the extension when I run with the following...
chrome --temp-profile --password-store=basic --load-extension=<dir> about:blank
Have used it for active debugging here.

version: Chromium 58.0.3029.110 Built on Ubuntu , running on Ubuntu 17.04

[DamienCassou]

@josephfrazier Thanks for the link. Apparently, chrome-launch does not support Chromium, only Chrome.

[DamienCassou]

Also, chrome-launch passes a new directory as default value for --user-data-dir which is not compatible with native messages (they require a manifest file per native application in <user-data-dir>/NativeMessagingHost: hughsk/chrome-launch#7.

[Miserlou]

Status of this feature? Would be super handy!

[kumar303]

There are some changes in #868 that will make it easier to start working on Chrome support.

[heikir]

@kumar303 Any updates on this feature request? Is it currently high or low priority?

[kumar303]

@rpl would probably be able to say! I think we are close.

[rpl]

Fixed by #1392 \o/

[rpl]

This is already merged on master (and so if you want to try it before it is released on npm, you can built web-ext from the master branch), and it will soon be part of the upcoming web-ext 3.2.0 release.