selenium - How can I launch Chrome with an unpacked extension?

Question

I'm using Selenium WebDriver to test a Google Chrome extension I'm developing. I noticed that ChromeDriver can be customised to add extensions to the instance of Chrome that it launches. This can be achieved using the AddExtension and AddExtensions methods of the ChromeOptions class.

The documentation for these methods indicates that they require extensions to be provided as crx files. Since I'm developing the extension, I don't have a crx file. I would like to be able to load the unpacked extension, but I couldn't find a method to do this.

I tried putting the extension files in a zip file and specifying this for the AddExtension method, but this caused an exception to occur since it wasn't a crx file. I also tried passing in the directory containing the unpacked files, but this produced a FileNotFoundException.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

I was able to achieve this by using the AddArgument method to directly pass the information to Chrome. Here's what it looks like in C#:

options = new ChromeOptions();
options.AddArgument("--load-extension=" + unpackedExtensionPath);