Notes on Developing with libdweb

August 13, 2018 · View on GitHub

mozilla/libdweb hosts a community effort to implement experimental APIs for Firefox WebExtensions with a goal of enabling dweb protocols in Firefox through browser add-ons. The long term goal of this project is to integrate these APIs into the WebExtensions ecosystem.

See also:

  • #343: Create WebExtensions Experiments to Prototype Missing APIs

TL;DR

  1. Execute commands below to fetch Firefox Nightly, build and run Companion extension in libdweb-enabled context:

    git clone -b libdweb --depth 1 https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-companion.git
cd ipfs-companion
npm run libdweb

  2. Optional Smoke-Test:

    • Open ipfs://bafkreickb4yq3sr3q2xqn3z3wzimilsa4wkbx25azqbvcnihq65moyjcvi
    • Open ipns://docs.ipfs.io
    • Open ipns://tr.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org
    • Confirm ipfs:// protocol remains in Location Bar (example)

Developer Notes

Install Firefox Nightly

How to Build and run libdweb-enabled bundle

# checkout libdweb branch into a new directory
# including submodules (namely ./libdweb)
git clone -b libdweb --depth 1 https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-companion.git
cd ipfs-companion

# install deps and build
npm run libdweb:build

# run in firefox-nightly
npm run libdweb:firefox

Manually run with different firefox binary

To run your extension in libdweb context:

npm run libdweb:build
export MOZ_DISABLE_CONTENT_SANDBOX=1
web-ext run --firefox=/path/to/nightly/firefox-bin --browser-console --url about:debugging

Additional notes:

  • Script libdweb:firefox will download latest Firefox Nightly to ./firefox/firefox
  • After initially running libdweb:build it is ok to use yarn watch – it will work as expected

Known Issues

If you are using yarn it may not update github-based dependencies and produce bogus this.content is undefined errors.

Fix is to make sure you run the latest versions of libdweb and other dev deps by removing yarn cache. Execute yarn cache clean.

Appendix: Smoke-Testing libdweb APIs

Protocol Handler API

  1. Open ipfs://bafkreickb4yq3sr3q2xqn3z3wzimilsa4wkbx25azqbvcnihq65moyjcvi
  2. Open ipns://docs.ipfs.io
  3. Confirm ipfs:// protocol remains in Location Bar (example)

References