How to develop extension with hot reload?

[aspiers]

I see that I can load the unpacked extension as normal simply by going to chrome://extensions/, enabling developer mode, hitting the Load unpacked button. But this won't pick up changes to the source code. Ideally there should be a hot reload mechanism, and the whole setup documented to make it easy for other devs to contribute.

I'm curious if you've already established a workflow for hot reload, or at least quick reload? There is plenty of prior art for this, e.g.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2963260/how-do-i-auto-reload-a-chrome-extension-im-developing

and

https://github.com/fregante/browser-extension-template

but it would be good to align on something.

[pjpscriv]

This is a good call to raise for extension development more generally, but not sure something that needs it's own issue on this repo. If someone really wanted to make changes - maybe adding some guidance to this repo's wiki or a CONTRIBUTING.md?

The approach I've been taking devving using Chrome is:

• Load extension unpacked
• Make code changes
• Refresh extension in the chrome://extensions/ using this button: