Question

I’m trying my hands at a simple Chrome Extension, but am running into a problem with providing a value for the matches array in my content_scripts.

{
  "name": "My Extension",
  "version": "1.0",
  "description": "My Extension Experiment",
  "browser_action": {
    "default_icon": "icon.png",
    "default_title": "Ext",
    "default_popup": "popup.html"
  },
  "content_scripts": {
    "matches": ["http://*"],
    "js": ["scripts.js"]
  }
}

When I try to load this extension into Chrome, I get the following message:

Could not load extension from ‘C:\Users\foo\Desktop\Extensions\bar’.
Invalid value for ‘content_scripts’.

I cannot see what is “invalid” about my value though. What I’m trying to do is match every URL, so my extension can manipulate the DOM (via javascript within scripts.js) of any page it is ran on. Am I missing something, going about this all wrong, or what?

update

After posting this question, I did notice that the Google example was slightly different than mine, so I modified my code a bit to reflect their syntax:

"content_scripts": [{
  "matches": ["http://*"],
  "js": ["scripts.js"]
}]

That being said, I still get the following error when trying to load my extension:

Could not load extension from ‘C:\Users\foo\Desktop\Extensions\bar’.
Invalid value for ‘content_scripts[0].matches[0]’.

Answer 1

You need to surround the value of the content_scripts field in square brackets:

"content_scripts": [ {
  "matches": ["http://*"],
  "js": ["scripts.js"]
} ]

(see the Chrome Docs for more info)

Incidentally, using http://*/* would be a better match for all urls (see the docs), adding https://*/* if you also need to match those as well.

Edit:

Following your edit, the error you are getting is because of the match pattern being incorrect.