2. Production workflow

Handle extension version

If you take a look to your src/manifest.json, you will see that version is null.

When building, it injects the version of your package.json in your src/manifest.json. That means you should not update manifest.json's directly.

By doing this, it means that you could use one of the following commands to easily update your version:

npm version major # 1.x.x -> 2.x.x, when you release a breaking change
npm version minor # x.1.x -> x.2.x, when you release a feature
npm version patch # x.x.1 -> x.x.2, when you release a patch
npm version 1.2.3 # custom version

# for yarn:
yarn version --major
yarn version --minor
yarn version --patch
yarn version --new-version 1.2.3

Note: it is really recommended to follow Sementic Versioning rules!

Note: using npm version or yarn version will create update your package.json, create a new commit and a new tag, this is really helpful!

Building for production

Once you have updated your version, you can run:

$ npm run build
$ npm run build-zip

# for yarn:
$ yarn build
$ yarn build-zip

Those commands will:

• build your extension for production (and use your package.json version for your manifest.json), located in dist/
• build a .zip, located in dist/zip/<your-extension-name>-<version>.zip

When publishing on the Chrome Web Store (or Firefox Add-ons), you should upload your fresh .zip!

Automatic build and release with Travis

If you are using Travis, you can setup GitHub Releases upload in order to automatically build a zip of your extension and attach it to your GitHub releases (example):

script:
  - yarn build
  - yarn build-zip

before_deploy:
  - export RELEASE_EXTENSION_FILE=$(ls dist-zip/*.zip)
  - echo "Deploying ${RELEASE_EXTENSION_FILE} to GitHub releases"

deploy:
  provider: releases
  api_key:
    secure: <YOUR API KEY>
  file: '${RELEASE_EXTENSION_FILE}'
  skip_cleanup: true # To keep, otherwise your `.zip` will be cleaned
  on:
    repo: <YOUR REPO>
    tags: true # Only on a new git tag

This is really useful if you don't want to manually run commands from Building for production.