Reason to eject: I wanted better dev experience in my chrome extension

[kasperpeulen]

So I heard you guys appreciated to hear reasons to eject. For me it was that I wanted a better dev experience in my chrome extension development.

So I make some chrome extension content script. First I used this project like this: I changed index.html to kind of mimic the final real webpage I make the content script for. I did most of the development in this index.html playground, and then when I needed to really test it on the actual web page, I would build it, and then load the build directory as chrome extension.

But now, I got a bit further in development, and I need to test as a real chrome extension all the time. So the setup from create-react-app, doesn't work anymore. It is actually not that trivial to get any css hot reloading working with a chrome extension, or even just automatic refresh of the page after a change.

I ejected and I found this project:
https://github.com/schovi/webpack-chrome-extension

I copied changes from that project to the ejected boilerplate. And it all works now how I want it:
https://github.com/kasperpeulen/chrome-extension-template

Basically the changes are,

1. added a ManifestPlugin in config/webpack.config.dev.js (and the source of that plugin, as the project from @schovi doesn't seem to be on npm).
2. loaded a overrideHotUpdater function, before the dev server starts in scripts/start.js. This function is also from @schovi and the source is included in the repo.

[gaearon]

Thanks for the feedback!

[schovi]

@kasperpeulen Hi. It is funny, because I am currently working parallely on exactly same thing as create-react-app I made branch for that https://github.com/schovi/webpack-chrome-extension/tree/feature/standalone (check commits) But thanks to this project I want to rewrite whole thing to be more like it, because it is awesome! :) And it is not on npm, because I cant find good name for that.