Codenames Cheater

This is a bare bones starter for building React/Typescript extensions for Chrome using manifest_version: 3.

Under the hood, this starter leans pretty heavily on the infrastructure from Extend Chrome. The primary difference is this starter integrates some foundational code and manifest configuration for v3 which I couldn't find in the boilerplate examples they offer.

Notes

In my tinkering with this starter there are a few notes that I find helpful.

1. Manually bundle files

If you reference files that can't be automatically recognized, use the web_accessible_resources property in manifest to explicitly bundle them.

"web_accessible_resources": [
    {
      "resources": [
        "pages/popup/index.html",
        "pages/popup/App.tsx",
        "pages/popup/index.tsx"
      ],
      "matches": [
        "<all_urls>"
      ]
    }
  ]

2. Split v2 and v3 manifests

Though a little hacky, I have had some success generating v2 and v3 manifests with a little customization to this starter. The approach can be seen on my extension Link Roamer.

The premise is pretty simple: hook into a specific string value throughout your app and programmatically fire v2 or v3 API methods depending on the build environment.

In this way, functions can be conditionally compiled.

if ('isV3Manifest') {
  return (
    await chrome.scripting.executeScript({
      target: { tabId },
      func,
    })
  )[0].result
} else {
  return (
    await browser.tabs.executeScript(tabId, {
      code: `(${func})()`,
    })
  )[0]
}

Development

For development with automatic reloading:

npm run start

Open the Extensions Dashboard, enable "Developer mode", click "Load unpacked", and choose the dist folder.

When you make changes in src the background script and any content script will reload automatically.

Production

When it's time to publish your Chrome extension, make a production build to submit to the Chrome Web Store. This boilerplate will use the version in package.json, unless you add a version to src/manifest.json.

Make sure you have updated the name and version of your extension in package.json.

Run the following line:

yarn build

This will create a ZIP file with your package name and version in the releases folder.

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