electron/docs/tutorial/devtools-extension.md

DevTools extension

To make debugging more easy, Electron has added basic support for Chrome DevTools Extension.

For most devtools extensions, you can simply download their source codes 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 it in Electron by opening the devtools in arbitray window, and run this code in the console of devtools:

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 disappear 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 in 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 of chrome extensions, so for some devtools extensions that rely on this feature, they may not work well in Electron

chrome.* APIs

Some chrome extensions use chrome.* APIs for some features, there is some effort to implement those APIs in Electron to make them work, but we have only implemented few for now.

So if the devtools extension is using APIs other than chrome.devtools.*, it is very likely to fail, but you can report those extensions in the issues tracker so we can add support for those APIs.