pchrome

I wanted TypeScript type declarations and a Promise-oriented API for the Chrome API.

You can get one of the two, but not both, with existing stuff:

• DefinitelyTyped's chrome declaration file
• various Chrome promise libraries, including
  • chrome-promise
  • then-chrome
  • chromise

It's unfortunate, because the Chrome API is big (so you want type support) and does a lot of async I/O (so you want Promises and async/await).

Usage

index.js and index.d.ts are generated files that are in the repo and should work out of the box if you just npm install --save pchrome.

Then import * as pchrome from 'pchrome'; or var pchrome = require('pchrome') as appropriate for your module system.

Now use pchrome as though it's the chrome object, except calls with a callback parameter now return a Promise instead. (Look at the type declarations in index.d.ts for more details.) All other calls, events, member variables, and so on are still present on pchrome as well.

Read on for how the index.js and index.d.ts generated and how you can regenerate them.

Generation

See generate.ts, which has a little TypeScript d.ts grammar and basically transforms DefinitelyTyped's d.ts file into a promiseful version, along with JS wrappers for all the async functions.

Regeneration

Install dependencies with npm install and typings install.

Now npm -g install ts-node.

Then run npm run build, which executes generate.ts. That produces index.js and index.d.ts which are the promisified Chrome APIs.

Example

There's an example Chrome extension in the example/ subfolder.

Run webpack in that folder (assuming you have webpack and TypeScript installed). It will generate the bundle.js for the Chrome extension from background.ts and the pchrome library in the parent folder.

Then load example/ into Chrome as an unpacked extension.