Question

I’m developing a google chrome extension and I’m running into a relative path problem.
If I give a relative path to an image and open the plugin in a certain page it will look for that image in the website’s path rather than the extension’s.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

If you’re using CSS in your extension pages (background, popup, infobar, etc) then you can use relative paths with a slash (/):

background-image:url("/sprites.png");

The above should work, everyone uses it. But, if your using it for content scripts and you can do the same for any css, you would need to use the predefined message like:

background-image:url('chrome-extension://__MSG_@@extension_id__/sprites.png');

If you want to programmatically set it, you can use the chrome.extension.getURL syntax as following:

var url = chrome.extension.getURL('sprites.png');

These are the ways that you can refer to a specific url/image.

In addition, as mentioned in this answer, if you place your image assets in a directory, these files are not accessible in the web page DOM automatically. The developer should specify the resources that can be loaded the page by using the “web_accessible_resources” setting in the manifest.json file: