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DevTools extension
To make debugging easier, Electron has basic support for 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.
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
Then you can load the extension in Electron by opening devtools in any window, and then running the following code in the devtools console:
require('remote').require('browser-window').addDevToolsExtension('/some-directory/react-devtools')
To unload the extension, you can call 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 extension written for Chrome browser can be loaded by
Electron, but they have to be in a plain directory, for those packaged 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 for some devtools extensions that rely on this feature, they may not work in Electron.
chrome.*
APIs
Some chrome extensions use chrome.*
APIs for some features, there has been some
effort to implement those APIs in Electron, however not all are 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.