CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-chromegoogle-chrome-extension
njfife
njfife

Reputation: 3575

Rules for making a clickable link to install an extension in chrome?

I have finished an extension for my company and I want to put it on the company wiki so that in order to get it on everyone's machine all I have to do is go around and click the link.

First, I HAVE READ all the documentation from http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/hosting.html about hosting and autoupdating and all that. Part of it confuses me and I can't find any more information about this:

Google Chrome considers a file to be installable if either of the following is true:
The file has the content type application/x-chrome-extension
The file suffix is .crx and both of the following are true:
The file is not served with the HTTP header X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
The file is served with one of the following content types:
empty string
"text/plain"
"application/octet-stream"
"unknown/unknown"
"application/unknown"
"*/*"

This looks like it wants a MIME style setup? but I have never done anything with this. I have the ability to change what I want to the Locally hosted Wiki, all I need is to understand what need to change to make the link installable. I will keep looking for examples.

Note: The reason it is not going on the app store is that there is really no reason to. It is branded for our company, and communication with our specific servers is hard-coded into it.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1080

Answers (2)

Shanness
Shanness

Reputation: 395

You can do an "inline install" of an app hosted on the web store. The new changes are forcing people to move our extensions to the web store, but the inline installation should allow your users to not need to leave your page to install.

Upvotes: 2

apsillers
apsillers

Reputation: 115970

In version 21 (or so), Chrome disabled the ability to do a simple link-click install of off-store extensions. There is a discussion of the change in this bug report:

You are no longer supposed to be able to install extensions off-store in Chrome... In order to install off-store extensions, the user must download them to a directory and drag them onto chrome://extensions/.

There is, therefore, no longer any way to install an extension simply by clicking a link, except by hosting it in the Web Store. You will need to download the file and then drop it into chrome://extensions.

The documentation you reference looks out of date (that's Google's fault, not yours). It definitely fails to mention the new drag-and-drop requirement. It also talks about the file's "content type" and the X-Content-Type-Options HTTP header required to make the CRX installable; however, when you install an extension by dropping it into chrome://extensions, I doubt very much that Chrome remembers what HTTP headers were set when you first downloaded the file.

EDIT: You can also use the --enable-easy-off-store-extension-install command line flag to restore the old instalation behavior.

Upvotes: 4

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