Example addon implementation?

[shawly]

Hey!

We'd like to write a custom addon so we can use WebCord to automatically join a voice channel and turn on the webcam.

I wondered if you had any sample code for creating addons?

Thanks!

Never mind, I just read that it doesn't allow for code injection yet. So I guess we'll just write a small Chrome Extension.

Edit: Do Chrome Extensions need special permissions for WebCord or fulfill certain criteria? I just hacked a small extension together which works fine on Chrome, but when I load it with WebCord nothing happens..

[SpacingBat3]

Hey!
We'd like to write a custom addon so we can use WebCord to automatically join a voice channel and turn on the webcam.
I wondered if you had any sample code for creating addons?
Thanks!

Never mind, I just read that it doesn't allow for code injection yet. So I guess we'll just write a small Chrome Extension.

Not for the regular releases. Also I know that my own extension implementation isn't documented at all, this is because it is very limited for now and needs major rewrite to be functional enough. There's a lot of the work to be done, as I want to make extensions a secure way of injecting the code – so the users may know what extensions want to do and what type of the access it needs.

[shawly]

That explains why adding extensions is disabled in the Standalone version..
So that means there is currently no way to inject code? (except for rebuilding WebCord with the custom code of course)

[SpacingBat3]

No. devel builds has them enabled and you can actually inject the code (at least from what I believe I implemented). I was able to inject the CSS for instance (yes, WebCord has a special package.json to do that, so no coding skills are actually needed for the themes).

But because it is very likely to be rewritten in the future, you may want to start making a Chromium extension and then switch to the Node ones if you need to have an access to the Node API.

[shawly]

Yeah I just changed the addonsLoader.ts to be able to load unpacked extensions which works, as well as my super hacky auto join script.
Thing is, the Electron API documentation states that extensions won't be loaded permanently only for the session, so I have to hack the code anyway for it to load the extension when WebCord starts which means we need a custom build of WebCord anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

May as well check if I can implement my hacky auto joiner into WebCord natively so I don't have to use the Chrome extension layer in between. You may happen to know where I have access to the DOM in the WebCord code? NVM found a place where I can hack it in.

[SpacingBat3]

Yeah I just changed the addonsLoader.ts to be able to load unpacked extensions which works, as well as my super hacky auto join script. Thing is, the Electron API documentation states that extensions won't be loaded permanently only for the session, so I have to hack the code anyway for it to load the extension when WebCord starts which means we need a custom build of WebCord anyway. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

May as well check if I can implement my hacky auto joiner into WebCord natively so I don't have to use the Chrome extension layer in between. You may happen to know where I have access to the DOM in the WebCord code? NVM found a place where I can hack it in.

I can code that so they're loaded at the time page does. Nothing hard to do that, but because I will implement that within the new settings GUI, this may take me some time to implement something like that... The pros are it will be fast and user-friendly way to load and remove extensions. So don't expect it come that quickly, but once implemented, it will make me easier to implement it for my own Node API for a greater power over the application.

[shawly]

Looking forward to it! I just finished implementing my auto joiner hack and it works nicely, for our case I'll just make a custom build for now since we need it for a game session on the upcoming weekend.

We set up an RPi with a monitor and a camera which autostarts WebCord and with my hack it will automatically join the VC and turn on the camera so we don't need to connect any keyboard or mouse to the RPi and then our friend which is playing with us remotely can see and hear everyone at the table. Pretty niche use case but WebCord is perfect for this!

[SpacingBat3]

Edit: Do Chrome Extensions need special permissions for WebCord or fulfill certain criteria? I just hacked a small extension together which works fine on Chrome, but when I load it with WebCord nothing happens..

Unfortunately, these are broken as well. That is because Electron supports itself loading the unpacked extensions, where I coded that it should open the packed ones. So yea, that's actually the reason why it fails...
I'll probably work on the Chrome extensions before the Node ones. These are less powerful, as they only access to the website and has no access to the main process (that can access user's files and broke many stuff when it's malicious or broken).

[SpacingBat3]

The good news are that I found a way to unpack the extensions. With the special directory used to save them, this would be a way to save an information about the loaded extensions without much of the effort. I may implement the Chrome extensions once I'll have a time to do that (it's very limited as for now). I'm also open for the pull/push requests of others to implement that.

(Some spoilers of what I've actually done for now, read if you care.)

For now, I'm more focused about the bug fixes and the privacy features than the extensions, some changes will include the popup to warn users when either site redirects an URL to browser with different origin or tries to navigate to such page. This way malicious software can't just redirect users in any way to malicious sites, even those encrypted ones (`https`), as they're likely to reffer to different origin. Other changes will include the limitation within the permissions that Discord can grant, it will be limited only to the `media` (I believe that's microphone+webcam) and `desktop-share`. I've also found a way to have a screen share feature working with the `contextIsolation` enabled, so that is the next feature I will soon commit.

[SpacingBat3]

A few important changes were announced in commit 9ed84b7 – there's now an actual way to load at least some of Chrome/Chromium extensions in WebCord. The implementation is not finished yet, through – there's no GUI implemented to both load unpacked and crx extensions directly within WebCord, you need to unpack it and put in the proper directory (as mentioned in the commit message) on your own, which should be enough for testing how it works for you and which improvements you would expect from WebCord.