tab-reload-notify

This browser extension automatically reloads tabs using the file URI scheme when their content changes, by using file watch primitives. The Rust crate notify is used, thus supporting the following backends:

• Linux: inotify
• macOS: FSEvent/kqueue
• *BSD: kqueue
• Windows: ReadDirectoryChanges

Building

To build the extension, you will need npm, make, rsvg-convert, unzip and a nightly Rust toolchain. After having installed the dependencies, run the following command to build the extension, using web-ext.

make build

To build and install the native component, run:

./scripts/gen-installer.sh --current-target-only
./scripts/output/installers/install-$(rustc -vV | sed -n "s/host: //p").sh

Check out the help text and header for each script to find out about additional dependencies that may be required, as well as configuration options that may be provided.

You can also run

make run

and optionally specify an ARGS variable to run a Firefox/Chromium session with the extension enabled for debugging.

Installing

The extension can be installed from addons.mozilla.org or Chrome Web Store. However, a native component is needed for the extension to work. Install scripts can be found in the releases page.

Note

On Windows, you may need to install the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable v14 before being able to use the extension.

• Download page (x64)
• Download page (ARM64)

Development and Testing

First, you will need to install all the dependencies outlined in scripts/gen-installer.sh and scripts/run-vm-tests.sh.

Install Scripts

./scripts/gen-installer.sh will generate a install script for the native component of the extension, for each supported target, using POSIX sh on *nix targets andPowershell 5.1 on Windows targets.

Virtual Machines

You may run ./scripts/run-vm-tests.sh --download to download VM images and follow the instructions to set up the virtual machines for testing the extension.

Note

You can also run the tests natively:

cd tests

npm install
npx puppeteer browsers install firefox

BROWSER=firefox EXT_PATH=../web-ext-artifacts node main.ts
BROWSER=chrome EXT_PATH=../web-ext-artifacts node main.ts

Signing

If you are in possession of a signing key, you may sign the extension by running

chromium --pack-extension=web-ext-artifacts/extension --pack-extension-key=key.pem

Tip

By having the extension's public key (which can be found in the manifest's key field), it is possible to derive the Chrome extension ID:

jq --raw-output '"-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----\n\(.key)\n-----END PUBLIC KEY-----"' src/manifest.json | \
    openssl pkey -in /dev/stdin -pubin -outform DER | shasum -a 256 | head -c32 | tr 0-9a-f a-p