Production Workflow

The following steps describe the intended release process and optional services to use (e.g. Travis).

Handle extension version

If you take a look to your src/manifest.json, you will see that version key does not exist.

This is perfectly normal. The version is automatically injected when building the extension, by taking the version from your package.json. You don't need to update your manifest.json directly.

By doing this, it means that you could use one of the following commands to easily update your version:

# with npm
npm version major # 1.x.x -> 2.x.x, when you release a breaking change
npm version minor # x.1.x -> x.2.x, when you release a feature
npm version patch # x.x.1 -> x.x.2, when you release a patch
npm version 1.2.3 # custom version

# for yarn:
yarn version --major
yarn version --minor
yarn version --patch
yarn version --new-version 1.2.3

Tips

1. It is recommended to follow Sementic Versioning rules!
2. Using npm version or yarn version will update your package.json, create a new commit and a new tag, this is really helpful!

Building for production

Once you have updated your version, you can run npm run build.

This command will:

• build your extension for production (and use your package.json version for your manifest.json), located in dist/
• build a .zip, located in articats/<name>-<version>-<mode>.zip

When publishing on the Chrome Web Store (or Firefox Add-ons), you should upload your fresh .zip!

Automatic build and release with Travis

If you are using Travis, you can setup GitHub Releases upload in order to automatically build a zip of your extension and attach it to your GitHub releases (example):

script:
  - yarn build

before_deploy:
  - export RELEASE_EXTENSION_FILE=$(ls artifacts/*.zip)
  - echo "Deploying ${RELEASE_EXTENSION_FILE} to GitHub releases"

deploy:
  provider: releases
  api_key:
    secure: <YOUR API KEY>
  file: '${RELEASE_EXTENSION_FILE}'
  skip_cleanup: true # To keep, otherwise your `.zip` will be cleaned
  on:
    repo: <YOUR REPO>
    tags: true # Only on a new git tag

This is really useful if you don't want to manually run commands from Building for production.

Automatic build and release with GitHub Actions

If you are using GitHub Actions, you can easily automatically build a zip of your extension and create a new GitHub release, each time a new tag is pushed.

on:
    push:
        tags:
            - 'v*' # Push events to matching v*, i.e. v1.0, v20.15.10

name: Release

jobs:
    build:
        name: Create Release
        runs-on: ubuntu-latest
        steps:
            -   uses: actions/checkout@v2
            -   run: |
                    git fetch --prune --unshallow

            -   name: Install Node.js
                uses: actions/setup-node@v1
                with:
                    node-version: 12.x

            -   run: yarn install --frozen-lockfile

            -   run: yarn build

            -   name: Create Release
                id: create_release
                uses: actions/create-release@v1
                env:
                    GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
                with:
                    tag_name: ${{ github.ref }}
                    release_name: Release ${{ github.ref }}

            -   name: Upload Assets to Release with a wildcard
                uses: csexton/release-asset-action@v2
                with:
                    pattern: "artifacts/*.zip"
                    github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
                    release-url: ${{ steps.create_release.outputs.upload_url }}