Pythonic .crx file generation

pycrxlib generates the .crx archives used to distribute extensions to Google's webbrowser Chrome (see e.g. here). It's a programmatic API, i.e. it's intended to be used from Python based build tools, e.g. Fabric, Ansible, Paver or possibly others.

This script is heavily based on crxmake-python by @bellbind, but intended to be integrated in a Python toolchain in a bit more conventional way, e.g. installable via PyPI and easier to integrate (there's also a slightly different method of getting M2Crypto to generate a DER public key).

pycrxlib needs M2Crypto to run (which in it's turn must have Swig installed on the target system).

Usage

If you never have packed your extension before, the easiest way is to pack manually one time to get your private key (described here). After that you have a private key (xxx.pem file).

You use pycrxlib by calling a simple entry point, crx.write. It takes 3 parameters, the path to the extension you want to pack, the desired archive name and your extensions private key.

An example of a simple hypothetical Fabric file can be seen here, but the gist of it is that you simply import the library:

>>> import crx

and then call the function with your parameters:

>>> crx.write('my-extension-dir', 'my-extension.crx', pemfile='my-pem-file.pem')

you can use the named parameter pem to pass in the private key as a string instead of a path name (but remember to think about where you put that private key, m'kay?).