HOWTO develop chrome extensions with auto reload

When it comes to developing chrome extensions, you can waste endless amount of hours reloading the extension after every change.

Your workflow looks something like this

1. make a change in a file
2. go to chrome://extensions/
3. click "reload"
4. reload your tab
5. change appears then back to 1

Instead we came up with a small hack to automatically reload the extension after a file has been changed.

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How it works:

• a script watches the vrome directory for file changes
• whenever a file is modified, the script updates a temporary file to indicate we have a change
• in chrome://extensions/ we open the developer tools console (CTRL + Shift + J), we then insert a function. The function makes an ajax call every X milliseconds to the server
• The server will return the value from the temporary file
• When that value changes, the extension is reload via Javascript

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Clear step by step instructions on how to make it work:

1. install watch_and_do gem install watch_and_do -v 0.0.3
2. go to root of project ~/vrome and start watching for changes using watch_and_do . js utils/update_version.rb Whenever a js file is modified, it will call the utils/update_version.rb script
3. start the ruby server located in system/ruby/bin/vrome
4. go to chrome://extensions/
5. unpack the extension if it isn't already + make sure it is enabled
6. open the developer tools console (CTRL + SHIFT + J)
7. copy/paste the content of reload_extension.js in utils
8. do not forget to modify the extensionID variable (view reload_extension.js script)
9. You can now test it by making a change in one of the JS file. watch_and_do will report the change and update the version number then the code in the console in chrome://extensions/ will call the server and reload the extension
10. Develop chrome extensions efficiently

Please note you can use something other than watch_and_do e.g inotifywatch to watch for file changes

Please also note that you still have to reload the tab -- maybe that's something we could automate too.