Webpack Extension Reloader

A Webpack plugin to automatically reload chrome extensions during development.

Installing

npm

npm i -D @reorx/webpack-ext-reloader

What is this?

This is a webpack plugin that allows you to bring hot reloading functionality to WebExtensions, essentially webpack-dev-server, but for WebExtensions.

This is a fork from webpack-extension-reloader, maintained and updated by Reorx. The goal here is to continue to support the latest version of webpack and Chrome Extension Manifest V3.

Note: This plugin doesn't support Hot Module Replacement (HMR) yet.

How to use

You can simply check reorx/webpack-chrome-boilerplate to see how it works in a demo project.

Caution

1. This plugin is supposed to work with extension with background page (which is called service worker in MV3), where the chrome.runtime.reload() is executed when changes happen. If your extension doesn't have a background page, you can separate the manifest.json file by environment, adding background for development mode. (Example can be found in this project: github-toc-sidebar)

2. Even with background page, the plugin is still not guaranteed to work all the time, due to the mechanism that Chrome would terminate a service worker when its not actively receiving events (see The extension service worker lifecycle). The easiest way to keep the service worker awake is to inspect it from the chrome://extensions page, see Debugging the service worker.

Using as a plugin

Add @reorx/webpack-ext-reloader to the plugins section of your webpack configuration file. Note that this plugin don't outputs the manifest (at most read it to gather information). For outputing not only the manifest.json but other static files too, use CopyWebpackPlugin.

const ExtReloader = require('@reorx/webpack-ext-reloader');

plugins: [
  new ExtReloader(),
  new CopyWebpackPlugin([
      { from: "./src/manifest.json" },
      { from: "./src/popup.html" },
    ]),
]

You can point to your manifest.json file...

plugins: [
  new ExtReloader({
    manifest: path.resolve(__dirname, "manifest.json")
  }),
  // ...
]

... or you can also use some extra options (the following are the default ones):

// webpack.dev.js
module.exports = {
  mode: "development", // The plugin is activated only if mode is set to development
  watch: true,
  entry: {
    'content-script': './my-content-script.js',
    background: './my-background-script.js',
    popup: 'popup',
  },
  //...
  plugins: [
    new ExtReloader({
      port: 9110, // Which port use to create the server
      reloadPage: true, // Force the reload of the page also
      entries: { // The entries used for the content/background scripts or extension pages
        contentScript: 'content-script',
        background: 'background',
        extensionPage: 'popup',
      }
    }),
    // ...
  ]
}

Note I: entries or manifest are needed. If both are given, entries will override the information comming from manifest.json. If none are given the default entries values (see above) are used.

And then just run your application with Webpack in watch mode:

NODE_ENV=development webpack --config myconfig.js --mode=development --watch

Note II: You need to set --mode=development to activate the plugin (only if you didn't set on the webpack.config.js already) then you need to run with --watch, as the plugin will be able to sign the extension only if webpack triggers the rebuild (again, only if you didn't set on webpack.config).

Multiple Content Script and Extension Page support

If you use more than one content script or extension page in your extension, like:

entry: {
  'my-first-content-script': './my-first-content-script.js',
  'my-second-content-script': './my-second-content-script.js',
  // and so on ...
  background: './my-background-script.js',
  'popup': './popup.js',
  'options': './options.js',
  // and so on ...
}

You can use the entries.contentScript or entries.extensionPage options as an array:

plugins: [
  new ExtReloader({
    entries: {
      contentScript: ['my-first-content-script', 'my-second-content-script', /* and so on ... */],
      background: 'background',
      extensionPage: ['popup', 'options', /* and so on ... */],
    }
  }),
  // ...
]

License

This project has been forked from SimplifyJobs/webpack-ext-reloader, which is licensed under the MIT license. All changes made in this fork have been licensed via the MIT license.