webextension helper

Speed up the distribution of self-hosted Firefox webextensions

• provides a lightweight web service to serve your JSON update manifest ;
• ease the usage of web-ext via a simple docker image to sign your webextension on AMO

Dependencies

This tool relies on docker and docker-compose. See https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/

Some shortcuts are provided by a Makefile. You will need make to use them, but the tool is not mandatory.

Installation

• navigate to your webextension's project directory

cd /home/<username>/dev/webextension

• move all sources to a new subdirectory src. If you already used the web-ext npm package in this directory before you should also move your add-on id file.

mkdir src
mv !(src) src
[ -f .web-extension-id ] && mv .web-extension-id src

• clone this repository as a submodule of the webextension

git submodule add [email protected]:alexandre-abrioux/webextension-helper.git helper

• copy helper/.env.dist to helper/.env and fill in your Mozilla API credentials. You can find all the available options on the web-ext reference page.

cp helper/.env.dist helper/.env
vim helper/.env

Signing your Web-Extension

Simply run make sign.

Updating Mozilla's web-ext Tool

To rebuild the web-ext docker image you can run make update.

Enabling Auto-Updates

• configure your webextension's manifest file to target the update.php script

"applications": {
  "gecko": {
    "update_url": "https://webextension-helper.example.com/updates.php"
  }
}

• use the docker-compose.yml file to start the web service on your server

make up

Makefile

Some shortcuts are configured in a Makefile. Use make help for more information.

• make help
• make build
• make up
• make stop
• make down
• make restart
• make sign
• make update