Chrome Extension Skeleton

Development

Installation

$ git clone https://github.com/redox/chrome-extension-skeleton.git

# in case you don't have Grunt yet
$ sudo npm install -g grunt-cli

Build instructions

# install dependencies
$ npm install

# generate your private key (required for Chrome)
$ openssl genrsa 2048 | openssl pkcs8 -topk8 -nocrypt > mykey.pem

# build it
$ grunt

When developing, write unit-tests, use the dev Grunt task to check that your JS code passes linting tests and unit-tests.

When ready to try out the extension in the browser, use default Grunt task to build it. In build directory you'll find develop version of the extension in unpacked-dev subdirectory (with source maps), and production (uglified) version in unpacked-prod directory.

Dev workflow

1. Open chrome://extensions
2. Enable the developer mode
3. Click the "Load unpacked extension..." button
4. Locate the build/unpacked-dev folder
5. Every time you update the code, wait for the Grunt watch+build to end and click "Reload"

Grunt tasks

• clean: clean build directory
• test: JS-lint and mocha test, single run
• dev: continuous test loop
• default: clean, test, build step (copy all necessary files to build directory, browserify JS sources, prepare production version (using uglify) and pack the crx