openforge-greasemonkey-multi-script-compiler

About

This is a framework that builds a browser extension from a collection of userscripts. It was used to build the Flix Plus Chrome extension for Lifehacker. Because this framework has only been used a single time for a single browser so far, more work is necessary to make it more general purpose.

It is a spiritual successor to greasemonkey-multi-script-compiler

How it works

• You fill in some configuration files, provide icons, etc and place all userscripts into a folder.

• A compiler (written in Python) will use this information to create a Chrome extension that concatenates userscripts into two contentscripts (one is run as a page starts rendering and another is run afterward). It allows turning on/off features and produces an options page to control it. It also disables logging from userscripts (unless a higher loglevel is set) and warns the user about potentially dangerous keywords found in scripts.

• The developer can configure script metadata by editing a CSV (Open Office works well for this.)

Setup

1. Since this project is dependent on OpenForge, set that up first. Name the folder based on the extension you are trying to build.

2. Then clone this project to a separate top-level folder (call it openforge-greasemonkey-multi-script).

3. Create some symlinks to link OpenForge with this framwork and make the build scripts executable by running these commands. (Change paths if needed)

   cd ~/flix_plus
   rm -rf src
   ln -s  ~/openforge-greasemonkey-multi-script-compiler/_output/flix_plus/ src
   ln -s  ~/openforge-greasemonkey-multi-script-compiler compiler
   cp compiler/_util/* .
   chmod +x z
   chmod +x compiler/y

Building

You can build an extension by running ./z from the flix_plus folder. The Chrome extension is built in fix_plus/development/chrome.

Development

More will be written on this soon. But essentially you can run the greasemonkey-to-extension compiler by running ./y from the flix_plus/compiler folder. It uses _inputs/flix_plus/script_info.csv which you can edit via Open Office by running compiler/x.

New userscripts should be placed in flix_plus/compiler/_inputs/flix_plus/userscripts.

Licensing

This framework is licensed GPL.