It is possible to setup a directory to "in-place-edit" a firefox extension. By this the effort between editing and testing of the Firefox-extension can be reduced.
I have found the good explanation on the blog https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2009/01/28/how-to-develop-a-firefox-extension/
Here I want to give the principal steps necessary to achieve the "in-place-edit"
Step 1: You have to find your profile directory of Firefox.
For example in Linux this would often be often something like this:
~/.mozilla/firefox/#%#%.default/
Step 2: Go to this profile directory
Step 3: If you already have any extensions installed (like for example adblock+ or noscript), then inside this profile directory you will find a folder named extensions. If you do not have yet any additional extension installed, it might be easy to simply install any, only to have the **extensions" folder be setup for you.
Step 4: In this extensions folder you can create a new directory (let us name it "myextensions_1"), which shall contain the stuff of your plugin. This stuff would be the ordinary things like the install.rdf
, chrome.manifest
files and the content
,skin
,locale
subdirectories. In effect all the stuff you would normaly zip up to become the XPI file.
Step 5. Create a file that is equal to the content of the <em:id>
tag that you used in your ìnstall.rdf file. So if you used <em:id>myextensionname@author.org</em:id>
you need to create a file named myextensionname@author.org
. Inside this file you will write the location of the "in-place-edit-extension-folder" we created before. In our example this we would have
- the file
myextensionname@author.org
- which contains only the text
~/.mozilla/firefox/#%#%.default/extensions/myextensions_1
Of course the text depends on the location of the folder you use for your plugin.
If you did all things correctly - and maybe double-checked with the instructions of the link above - you can restart or "newly start" firefox. The browser will ask you if you want to allow the usage of the plugin myextensionname@author.org, which you can conceed.
Now you can edit in the folder ~/.mozilla/firefox/#%#%.default/extensions/myextensions_1
and need not to worry about zipping-up -> renaming -> installing.
You simple restart Firefox and the edits to your extensions code will become available.
This will allow you swifter and faster developing "in-place".