electron-extensions

electron-extensions will allow you to use Chrome extensions APIs with Electron.

Installation

$ npm install electron-extensions

Usage

The library is really easy-to-use. All you have to do is to put the following code in your main process:

import { ExtensibleSession } from 'electron-extensions/main';
import { app, session } from 'electron';

app.on('ready', () => {
  ...
  const extensions = new ExtensibleSession(session.defaultSession);
  extensions.loadExtension('C:/.../abcdefghijklmnoprstuwxyz'); // Path to the extension to load
  ...
});

Documentation

Class ExtensibleSession

new ExtensibleSession(session: Electron.Session)

• session Electron.Session - used for injecting preloads to load content_scripts in all webContents within a given Electron session. Must be called in app ready event.

If the webContents are in multiple BrowserWindows, the --window-id=<the BrowserWindow id> additional argument should be passed to the webContents. For reference see the Electron documentation.

For example:

{
  webPreferences: {
    additionalArguments: ['--window-id=1'],
  },
}

If you want to prevent injecting content_scripts to some URLs that start with a specified string, use --blacklist=.

For example:

{
  webPreferences: {
    additionalArguments: ['--blacklist=["wexond://"]'],
  },
}

It means all URLs starting with wexond:// should be protected from injecting content_scripts.

It's only for the main process. It's used to load extensions and handle their events.

Instance methods

loadExtension(path: string)

Loads an extension from a given path.

addWindow(window: Electron.BrowserWindow)

Adds a BrowserWindow to send and observe UI related events such as chrome.browserAction.setBadgeText or chrome.browserAction.onClicked.

Object extensionsRenderer

Usage in renderer

import { extensionsRenderer } from 'electron-extensions/renderer';

Instance methods

browserAction.onClicked(extensionId: string, tabId: number)

Sends chrome.browserAction.onClicked event to a given extension.

Events

set-badge-text

Emitted when chrome.browserAction.setBadgeText has been called in an extension.

Returns:

• extensionId string
• details chrome.browserAction.BadgeTextDetails

create-tab

Emitted when chrome.tabs.create has been called in an extension.

Example:

import { extensionsRenderer } from 'electron-extensions';

extensionsRenderer.on('create-tab', (details, callback) => {
  const tab = createTab(details) // Some create tab method...
  callback(tab.id);
})

Returns:

• details chrome.tabs.CreateProperties
• callback (tabId: number) => void - Must be called with the created tab id as an argument. Also, the tabId must be the same as any attached webContents id