I've been developing Chrome Extensions for over five years. I love making tools to help people work smarter and faster. With @crxjs/vite-plugin, I aim to take the grunt work out of making Chrome Extensions. My goal is to help you move fast and focus on what you're making, not how to get it to work.

Making a general-purpose build tool for Chrome Extensions is a colossal task. Chrome Extensions are a complex and evolving field. I want to continue working on this project full-time; your support will help me continue to create the best Chrome Extension developer experience out there.

Sponsoring as a business

As a business with a Chrome Extension, you know developer time is expensive. How much time do your engineers save using @crxjs/vite-plugin? If the value of my work is significant to your business, please consider committing to my business tier. Your investment will help me cover more use cases and improve our developer experience.

Sponsoring as an individual

Without proper developer tools, it's hard to move quickly and be confident that the browser is loading the changes you just made. Any support you want to provide will help me continue to devote my time to Chrome Extension tools, so you don't have to!

Why @crxjs/vite-plugin?

Historically the developer experience for Chrome Extensions has lagged behind the rest of the web. HMR didn't exist even for HTML pages, and it involved reloading multiple contexts to view a single change during development. If you wanted to use third-party libraries or modern development tools, project setup required finding and cloning a complex boilerplate.

I set out to change that four years ago by developing a Rollup plugin for Chrome Extensions called rollup-plugin-chrome-extension (RPCE). This Rollup plugin was different from the existing solutions because it uses the extension manifest to define the bundler entry points. In addition, it added an auto reloader that revolutionized the developer experience. No more manual reloading!

I started working on adding Vite support to RPCE and came up with @crxjs/vite-plugin, a Vite plugin that provides true HMR for Chrome Extensions and reduces project setup to a few lines of code. It has all the strengths of RPCE with an even better developer experience.