electron/docs/tutorial/devtools-extension.md

DevTools Extension

To make debugging easier, Electron has basic support for the Chrome DevTools Extension.

For most DevTools extensions you can simply download the source code and use the BrowserWindow.addDevToolsExtension API to load them. The loaded extensions will be remembered so you don't need to call the API every time when creating a window.

** NOTE: React DevTools does not work, follow the issue here https://github.com/atom/electron/issues/915 **

For example, to use the React DevTools Extension , first you need to download its source code:

$ cd /some-directory
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/facebook/react-devtools.git

Follow the instructions in react-devtools/shells/chrome/Readme.md to build the extension.

Then you can load the extension in Electron by opening DevTools in any window, and running the following code in the DevTools console:

require('remote').require('browser-window').addDevToolsExtension('/some-directory/react-devtools/shells/chrome');

To unload the extension, you can call the BrowserWindow.removeDevToolsExtension API with its name and it will not load the next time you open the DevTools:

require('remote').require('browser-window').removeDevToolsExtension('React Developer Tools');

Format of DevTools Extension

Ideally all DevTools extensions written for the Chrome browser can be loaded by Electron, but they have to be in a plain directory. For those packaged with crx extensions, there is no way for Electron to load them unless you find a way to extract them into a directory.

Background Pages

Currently Electron doesn't support the background pages feature in Chrome extensions, so some DevTools extensions that rely on this feature may not work in Electron.

chrome.* APIs

Some Chrome extensions may use chrome.* APIs for features and while there has been some effort to implement those APIs in Electron, not all have been implemented.

Given that not all chrome.* APIs are implemented if the DevTools extension is using APIs other than chrome.devtools.*, the extension is very likely not to work. You can report failing extensions in the issue tracker so that we can add support for those APIs.