Chrome Extension Boilerplate with React and Webpack
Features
This is a basic Chrome Extensions boilerplate to help you write modular and modern Javascript code, load CSS easily and automatic reload the browser on code changes.
This boilerplate is updated with:
This boilerplate is heavily inspired by and adapted from https://github.com/samuelsimoes/chrome-extension-webpack-boilerplate, with additional support for React 16.6+ features and Webpack 4+.
Please open up an issue to nudge me to keep the npm packages up-to-date. FYI, it takes time to make different packages with different versions work together nicely.
Installing and Running
Procedures:
- Check if your Node.js version is >= 8.
- Clone this repository.
- Change the package's
name
,description
, andrepository
fields inpackage.json
. - Change the name of your extension on
src/manifest.json
. - Run
npm install
to install the dependencies. - Run
npm start
- Load your extension on Chrome following:
- Access
chrome://extensions/
- Check
Developer mode
- Click on
Load unpacked extension
- Select the
build
folder.
- Access
- Happy hacking.
Structure
All your extension's code must be placed in the src
folder.
The boilerplate is already prepared to have a popup, an options page, a background page, and a new tab page (which replaces the new tab page of your browser). But feel free to customize these.
Webpack auto-reload and HRM
To make your workflow much more efficient this boilerplate uses the webpack server to development (started with npm start
) with auto reload feature that reloads the browser automatically every time that you save some file in your editor.
You can run the dev mode on other port if you want. Just specify the env var port
like this:
$ PORT=6002 npm run start
Content Scripts
Although this boilerplate uses the webpack dev server, it's also prepared to write all your bundles files on the disk at every code change, so you can point, on your extension manifest, to your bundles that you want to use as content scripts, but you need to exclude these entry points from hot reloading (why?). To do so you need to expose which entry points are content scripts on the webpack.config.js
using the chromeExtensionBoilerplate -> notHotReload
config. Look the example below.
Let's say that you want use the myContentScript
entry point as content script, so on your webpack.config.js
you will configure the entry point and exclude it from hot reloading, like this:
{
…
entry: {
myContentScript: "./src/js/myContentScript.js"
},
chromeExtensionBoilerplate: {
notHotReload: ["myContentScript"]
}
…
}
and on your src/manifest.json
:
{
"content_scripts": [
{
"matches": ["https://www.google.com/*"],
"js": ["myContentScript.bundle.js"]
}
]
}
Secrets
If you are developing an extension that talks with some API you probably are using different keys for testing and production. Is a good practice you not commit your secret keys and expose to anyone that have access to the repository.
Create a .env
file in the root directory of your project. Add environment-specific variables on new lines in the form of NAME=VALUE
. For example:
DB_HOST=localhost
DB_USER=root
DB_PASS=s1mpl3
process.env
now has the keys and values you defined in your .env
file.
const db = require('db')
db.connect({
host: process.env.DB_HOST,
username: process.env.DB_USER,
password: process.env.DB_PASS
})
Packing
After the development of your extension run the command
$ NODE_ENV=production npm run build
Now, the content of build
folder will be the extension ready to be submitted to the Chrome Web Store. Just take a look at the official guide to more infos about publishing.