Web Extension Preset

[Morikko]

Creating web extension easily over webpack and web-ext

• Use web-ext tool for development (open a specific browser environment)
• Build the final project with web-ext (final source, ZIP and XPI)
• Lint the project with web-ext on top of any classical code lint
• Read the manifest to detect automatically some paths (panel, popup...)

See the README.md in webextension/ for more information.

Note

• This PR is the continuation of Add a webextension preset #567 based on issue WebExtension preset #306.
• I haven't rebase on 8.2.3 because I got webpack error I don't have with 8.2.0
• A review of the code would be welcomed for knowing if I am doing the preset in the right way

Repository for testing: webextension-neutrino-test

[Morikko]

Problems

• Copied files are not removed in ./dev if removed from ./src
• New files in ./src don't trigger a rebuild (but are copied after a rebuild due to a modification on another file)
• Lots of warnings due to the use of eval
• When building, all js target (without HTML: content scripts and background.js) are not working because runtime.js is not imported...
• Lots of error reported in Firefox console from the bundled files. Example below.

   ReferenceError: reference to undefined property "disabled"[Learn More]  CustomizableUI.jsm:2480:5
   TypeError: cannot use 'in' operator to search for 'canGoBack' in 'browser'[Learn More]  tabbrowser.xml:2473:1
   ReferenceError: reference to undefined property "additionalBackgrounds"[Learn More]  LightweightThemeConsumer.jsm:161:5
   ReferenceError: reference to undefined property "backgroundsAlignment"[Learn More]  LightweightThemeConsumer.jsm:205:5
   ReferenceError: reference to undefined property "initialPageLoadedFromURLBar"[Learn More]  tabbrowser.xml:697:1
   ...

[eliperelman]

To update here, we made significant changes in #852 that eliminates the Neutrino CLI. To continue forward with this, we would need to change this to instead output the config required for webext to consume the middleware. Are you still willing to pick up on this?

[Morikko]

If I understood well, in webext-config.js, it would be like this:

const neutrino = require('neutrino');

module.exports = neutrino().webext(config => {
  // Overwrites the config here
});

Where neutrino().webext() is the default config from the middleware (like in packages/webextension/index.js) ?

[edmorley]

Hi!

Yes that sounds right.

After #852, we no longer have a Neutrino CLI that calls various tools by their node API, and instead rely on the tool's own CLIs / native config files.

I'm not very familiar with web extensions, but reading through the web-ext package docs it seems that it will auto-detect a file named .web-ext-config.js or web-ext-config.js. As such, if the web-ext CLI is to be used, that file should contain the module.exports = neutrino().webext(), and the .webext() command registered using something like:
https://github.com/mozilla-neutrino/neutrino-dev/blob/b6eb31ffee0b1e1f50504355d74da4472b4a03b8/packages/jest/src/index.js#L21

That said, I can't tell from skimming through this PR whether it used to invoke the webpack build at all? (I guess the neutrino.on('build', ...) was cumulative, and so it did invoke webpack as well as the webext API?)

If it did, then perhaps this preset needs to change to using the webpack plugin instead? (Since otherwise two separate CLIs would have to be run sequentially)
https://github.com/rpl/webpack-webext-plugin

A couple of other things I spotted in the PR:

• config.resolve.modules and config.resolveLoader.modules can be removed (see Use default webpack module resolution #926)
• some of the deepmerge usages can be replaced with the spread operator (now that we require node 8.3+)

Hope that helps :-)

[edmorley]

Closing this out for now since there's no activity. If you or someone else has a chance to work through the suggested changes above, happy to answer any questions you might have :-)