TypeScript Types for the Web-Extension Polyfill

News: This Has Changed to Be a Pure Generator Project

This project supplies the TypeScript types for the WebExtension browser API Polyfill by Mozilla. @types/webextension-polyfill is not manually written, it is generated from these mozilla schema (.json) files:

• toolkit
• browser

Migration Guide From webextension-polyfill-ts

This used to be a wrapper library, which included webextension-polyfill. If you have been using webextension-polyfill-ts before, then you can easily move to @types/webextension-polyfill with these steps:

• Replace all imports of "webextension-polyfill-ts" with "webextension-polyfill".
• In all places, where you would import { browser }, you'll now need to import browser.

Examples:

// Before:
import { browser } from "webextension-polyfill-ts";
// After
import browser from "webextension-polyfill";

// Before:
import { browser, Cookies } from "webextension-polyfill-ts";
// After
import browser, { Cookies } from "webextension-polyfill";

How to Use:

This guide assumes you are already using webextension-polyfill. If you are looking for an example use-case, check out the development branch of my web-extension Forget Me Not.

• npm install webextension-polyfill (if you haven't done this already)
• npm install --save-dev @types/webextension-polyfill
• import browser from "webextension-polyfill";

If you want to use the generated types in your code, simply import them like this:

import { Cookies } from "webextension-polyfill";

function inspectCookie(cookie: Cookies.Cookie) {
    //...
}

All types are inside their respective namespace:

• Namespaces are named like their API, but with the first character as upper-case.
  • For example browser.cookies types are in the Cookies namespace
• Nested namespaces will remove the dot and have the first character after the dot as upper-case.
  • For example browser.devtools.inspectedWindow types are in the DevtoolsInspectedWindow namespace.

ES6 Module Loader

If you are loading the polyfill using native ES6 module loader, it will export a global object. I don't recommend that use-case, but if you are looking for types in this scenario, you can make the types work by creating a file global.d.ts with this content:

import type Browser from "webextension-polyfill";

declare global {
    const browser: Browser.Browser;
}

Note: I haven't tried the ES6 module loader approach, and the above will only get you the types. Check out Basic Setup with module bundlers for more information and don't ask me about it, as I have no clue whatsoever (aside from the types).

Unit Testing

Consider mockzilla-webextension for unit-testing. It combines all the types this package provides with some nifty mocking functionality.

Issues

There are still some issues left:

• Since the schema .json files have a lot of anonymous nested types, some of the types will have generated names.
  • These might change in the future, since the generated names are far from perfect.
• Some of the schema files are incomplete.. for example in some places, a null value is allowed, yet the schema file doesn't say anything about it. I have fixed some of these, but there are probably more.
• Not every API has been tested.

Contributing Guidelines:

See CONTRIBUTING.md

Help

All runtime issues you have should be reported at the webextension-polyfill. If you have problems, questions or other feedback about the generated types, please create an issue here on Github.

License

My generator code of this project has been released under the zlib/libpng License

The schema files from mozilla however have defined their own licences, which will be exported to the generated @types project as well. For example, there are files under the Mozilla Public License and some under a BSD style license.