Chrome Web Store

Chrome Web Store is the most popular store for browser extensions, as it makes them available in any Chromium-based browser, including Google Chrome, Edge, Brave, and many others.

To submit your extension to Chrome Web Store, you'll need to complete a few steps. Here, we'll go through them.

Developer account

Before you can publish items on the Chrome Web Store, you must register as a CWS developer and pay a one-time registration fee. You must provide a developer email when you create your developer account.

To register, just access the developer console. The first time you do this, the following registration screen will appear. First, agree to the developer agreement and policies, then pay the registration fee.

Once you pay the registration fee and agree to the terms, your account will be created, and you'll be able to proceed to fill out additional information about it.

There are a few fields that you'll need to fill in:

• Publisher name: Appears under the title of each of your extensions. If you are a verified publisher, you can display an official publisher URL instead.
• Verified email: Verifying your contact email address is required when you set up a new developer account. It's only displayed under your extensions' contact information. Any notifications will be sent to your Chrome Web Store developer account email.
• Physical address: Only items that offer functionality to purchase items, additional features, or subscriptions must include a physical address.

Submission

After registering your developer account, setting it up, and preparing your extension, you're ready to publish it to the store.

You can submit your extension in two ways:

• Manually: By uploading your extension's bundle directly to the store.
• Automatically: By using GitHub Actions to submit your extension to the stores.

The first submission must be done manually, while subsequent updates can be submitted automatically. We'll go through both approaches.

Manual submission

To manually submit your extension to stores, you will first need to get your extension bundle. If you ran the build step locally, you should already have the .zip file in your extension's build folder.

If you used GitHub Actions to build your extension, you can find the results in the workflow run. Download the artifacts and save them on your local machine.

Then, use the following steps to upload your item:

1. Go to the Chrome Web Store Developer Dashboard.
2. Sign in to your developer account.
3. Click on the Add new item button.
4. Click Choose file > your zip file > Upload. If your item's manifest and other contents are valid, you will see a new item in the dashboard.

After you upload the bundle, you'll need to fill in the extension's details, such as the icons, privacy settings, permissions justification, and other information.

Please refer to the official guides on how to set up your extension's details.

Automated submission

TurboStarter comes with a pre-configured GitHub Actions workflow to submit your extension to web stores automatically. It's located in the .github/workflows/publish-extension.yml file.

What you need to do is fill the keys.json file with your store's credentials using the keys.template.json file as a template:

{
  "chrome": {
    "clientId": "123",
    "clientSecret": "123",
    "refreshToken": "789",
    "extId": "abcd"
  }
}

Please refer to the official guide to learn how to get these credentials correctly.

After that, set EXTENSION_SUBMIT_KEYS as a secret in your Github repository to the content of keys.json file.

That's it! You can run the workflow and it will submit your extension to the Chrome Web Store.

{
  "chrome": {
    "clientId": "123",
    "clientSecret": "123",
    "refreshToken": "789",
    "extId": "abcd",
    "uploadOnly": true
  }
}

Review

After filling out the information about your item, you are ready to send it to review. Click on Submit for review button and confirm that you want to submit your item in the following dialog:

The confirmation dialog shown above also lets you control the timing of your item's publishing. If you uncheck the checkbox, your item will not be published immediately after its review is complete. Instead, you'll be able to manually publish it at a time of your choosing once the review is complete.

After you submit the item for review, it will undergo a review process. The time for this review depends on the nature of your item. See Understanding the review process for more details.

There are important emails like take down or rejection notifications that are enabled by default. To receive an email notification when your item is published or staged, you can enable notifications on the Account page.

The review status of your item appears in the developer dashboard next to each item. The status can be one of the following:

• Published: Your item is available to all users.
• Pending: Your item is under review.
• Rejected: Your item was rejected by the store.
• Taken Down: Your item was taken down by the store.

You'll receive an email notification when the status of your item changes.

You can learn more about the review process in the official guides listed below.