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About this extension

This is an extension to help user quickly open thier faviour bookmarks.

Running The Extension

1. Run npm install in the folder to install dependencies
2. Run npm run dev to start the development server (auto refreshes your extension on change)
3. Navigate to chrome://extensions in your browser
4. Ensure Developer mode is enabled (top right)
5. Click Load unpacked in the top left
6. Select the /build folder in this directory

After completing the above steps, you should see the developer, unpacked version appear in your extension list as well as the extension icon appear in your browser bar alongside the other extensions you may have installed.

To trigger the extension, simply click the extension icon.

All Available Commands

• npm run build - create a production ready build
• npm run postbuild - copies required Chrome extension files after build has completed
• npm run assemble - creates a production ready build and zips all files needed to publish in the web store to extension.zip
• npm run dev - creates a development server that can be used for hot reloading inside the Google Chrome extension ecosystem (see steps 1-6 above)
• npm run test - runs any Jest tests you may have
• npm run pretty - runs prettier on the /src folder
• npm run lint - runs eslint on the /src folder
• npm run build:tailwind - builds the Tailwind CSS files

Making Changes

Afer starting the dev server via npm run dev, changes will be automatically be rebuilt to /build via webpack and the unpacked Chrome extension will automatically be refreshed for you behind the scenes, meaning you don't need to press the refresh button on chrome://extensions. Note: you may need to re-toggle or refresh the popup / page to see actual UI changes reflected there after a rebuild (i.e. re-open it again by clicking the icon again).

Extending The Template

Extending this template would be similar to working on any other Create React App React application. The core of the React app lives in the /src and is unopinionated in terms of how it's been setup other than the basic routing and Tailwind CSS.

Manifest Explained

There are 2 key sections of the manifest with this example template:

Browser Action

  "browser_action": {
    "default_icon": "icon.png",
    "default_title": "Open Full Page"
  },

This portion of the manifest is used to define how the browser action (extension icon) should behave. In this case, we don't define anything other than the icon and the title, as the clicking action will be handled by the background script in background.js.

Background Scripts

  "browser_action": {
    "default_icon": {
      "32": "icon.png"
    },
    "default_title": "Open Full Page"
  },

This portion of the manifest tells the browser that we want to run some scripts in the background while this extension is enabled. In the case of this example template, the background script is there to listen for clicks on the extension icon and create a new tab pointing to index.html when those clicks occur. The background script lives outside of the /src folder as it shouldn't contain any React code.

Preparing to Publish

To prepare for publish, simply run npm run assemble which will kick off a production-ready build step and then zip all the contents to extension.zip in the folder root. This zip file will include all the files you need for your extension to be uploaded to the web store.

Note: if this isn't your first publish of your extension, make sure you bump up the verison number in the manifest (for example, 1.0.0 to 1.0.1), as the web store will require a new version in every update you upload.

Using TypeScript

TypeScript can easily be configured to work with this template as it's based on create-react-app. To get started, first run:

npm install --save typescript @types/node @types/react @types/react-dom @types/jest

Afterwards, create a tsconfig.json in the folder root with your desired settings. If you want, you can use the CRA default:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "target": "es5",
    "lib": [
      "dom",
      "dom.iterable",
      "esnext"
    ],
    "allowJs": true,
    "skipLibCheck": true,
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "allowSyntheticDefaultImports": true,
    "strict": true,
    "forceConsistentCasingInFileNames": true,
    "module": "esnext",
    "moduleResolution": "node",
    "resolveJsonModule": true,
    "isolatedModules": true,
    "noEmit": true,
    "jsx": "react"
  },
  "include": [
    "src"
  ]
}

Next, create a react-app-env.d.ts file in the /src folder with the following content:

/// <reference types="react-scripts" />

Finally, rename files to .tsx or .ts in the /src folder and you're ready to go!