Start Chrome with a temp profile & with preinstalled extension

Start Chrome with a temp profile

All Chrome Incognito windows share the same profiles, which make it harder when you need to debug a web application using  more then 2-3 accounts on the time. Using this script i create a temp profile folder and start chrome pointing to it. I also had to do a small change to the default Chrome installation to auto-install the AdBlock extension.

#!/bin/bash

BASE_TEMP_DIR=/tmp
TEMP_DIR=$(mktemp -d $BASE_TEMP_DIR/google-chome.XXXXXXX)

echo "Running Chrome with temp folder in: $TEMP_DIR"
google-chrome --user-data-dir=$TEMP_DIR --no-first-run

rm -rf $TEMP_DIR

Preinstall extension

Edit the file – `/opt/google/chrome/default_apps/external_extensions.json`
I also removed all the default Google Apps, and replaced it content with

// Dictionary of default apps to install into new profiles.  Each entry maps
// the extension's id to its crx's path (relative to this file) and the version
// of the extension contained in the crx.
//
// When an extension is added or removed here, the two lists 'default_apps_list'
// and 'default_apps_list_linux_dest' in build/common.gypi must also be updated.
{
  "cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb" : {
    // Load from a local file
    // "external_crx": "/path/to/file/adblock.crx",
    // "external_version": "1.0"
    
    // Install on launch
       "external_update_url": "https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx"
  }
}

Download Chrome CRX file

As for how to download the CRX file, a short Goggle search gave me this answer (which doesn’t work for me anymore — Updated 2014-12-17),

wget http://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx\?response\=redirect\&x\=id%3D[your-extention-uid]%26uc%26lang%3Den-US\&prod\=chrome

e.g - For AdBlock

wget http://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx\?response\=redirect\&x\=id%3Dcfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb%26uc%26lang%3Den-US\&prod\=chrome

Something else you can do is to install the extension from Goggle App Store, and then on the extension page > Enable “Developer mode” > And use “Pack Extension”, which will create the CRX file for you.

And here is a snippet of code I use

{
  // https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en
  "cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm": { "external_update_url": "https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx" },
  // https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/umatrix/ogfcmafjalglgifnmanfmnieipoejdcf?hl=en
  "ogfcmafjalglgifnmanfmnieipoejdcf": { "external_update_url": "https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx" },
  "": {}
}

Resources

• http://www.chromium.org/administrators/pre-installed-extensions
• http://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7184793/how-to-download-a-crx-file-from-the-chrome-web-store-for-a-given-id
• http://www.madhur.co.in/Reverse%20Engineering/Chrome/2011/06/03/reverseengineerchrome.html