web-ext-react

A CLI tool to help build and run ReactJS based WebExtensions, integrating web-ext with create-react-app

Highlights

Create ReactJS Web Extensions with no build configuration.

• No forked dependencies, uses create-react-app and web-ext as is, enabling you to easily keep up to date.
• Live reload of JavaScript and CSS as you work on your extension.

Limitations

This is a work in progress extracted from race-ext-react. Ideally web-ext-react would wrap web-ext and work as a drop in replacement for better ergonomics, while adding the additional React functionality.

Documentation

web-ext-react should be used with a project created with create-react-app. After creating a new react app with create-react-app my-app install web-ext-react and web-ext.

npm

npm install --save-dev web-ext web-ext-react

yarn

yarn add -D web-ext web-ext-react

Next you can add scripts to package.json

"scripts": {
  "start:firefox": "web-ext-react run | xargs -L1 web-ext run -u http://www.example.org/ -s",
  "build": "web-ext-react build | xargs -L1 web-ext build -o -s"
}

index.js

create-react-app creates a single app that can be used for all different aspects of a web extensions, content scripts, background script, popups, sidebar and options ui by adding conditional logic to the src/index.js auto generated by create-react-app, for example.

if (document.isBackground) {
  // some background script
} else if (document.isSidebarAction) {
  ReactDOM.render(
    <React.StrictMode>
      <Sidebar />
    </React.StrictMode>,
    document.getElementById("root")
  );
} else if (document.isBrowserAction) {
  ReactDOM.render(
    <React.StrictMode>
      <Popup />
    </React.StrictMode>,
    document.getElementById("root")
  );
} else if (document.isOptionsUi) {
  ReactDOM.render(
    <React.StrictMode>
      <Options />
    </React.StrictMode>,
    document.getElementById("root")
  );
} else if (document.isContentScripts) {
  // content script
  ReactDOM.render(
    <React.StrictMode>
      <App />
    </React.StrictMode>,
    document.getElementById("root")
  );
}

extension/manifest.json

You must create an extension/manifest.json

{
  "manifest_version": 2,
  "name": "web-ext-react dummy app",
  "version": "0.1",

  "description": "dummy app to test web-ext-react",
  "homepage_url": "https://github.com/mrloop/web-ext-react",
  "icons": {
    "48": "icon.svg",
    "96": "icon.svg"
  },
  "content_scripts": [
    {
      "matches": ["<all_urls>"],
      "js": [],
      "css": []
    }
  ],
  "background": {
    "page": "background-page.html"
  }
}

Note the "content_scripts" JS and CSS arrays are empty and will be populated at build time. We specify that the web extension will also run a background script, also note "background-page.html" is auto generated by web-ext-react. You don't need to add this yourself, the important part is the conditional invocation of different react components from index.js. For this manifest.json the src/index.js would contain code to run in the background and a content script conditional run depending on context run from.

if (document.isBackground) {
  // some background script
} else if (document.isContentScripts) {
  // content script
  ReactDOM.render(
    <React.StrictMode>
      <App />
    </React.StrictMode>,
    document.getElementById("root")
  );
}