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I'm playing with new-style packaged apps in Chrome 24, and I don't see any way to bring up Developer Tools to do debugging.

What's the recommended strategy for debugging?

Mihai Parparita
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Drew Sears
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3 Answers3

29

go to here

chrome://inspect/

find the page you want

Xieranmaya
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Starting on Chrome 24, you can right click and inspect your page or inspect the background page.

Right click on a Chrome Packaged App in Chrome 24

If your app doesn't have any open window to right click, you can go to chrome://extensions and use the Inspect Views links, from where you can open Developer Tools for any of your app pages, including those in the background.

Before Chrome 24, the only difference is that the background page could only be inspected using the chrome://extensions link, there was no "Inspect background page" in the right click menu.

UPDATE: If you want to debug an app installed from the Chrome Web Store, you need to enable the flag "Enable debugging for packed apps" in the chrome:flags page:

enter image description here

After that, right click will work on any app.

mangini
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    right click indeed works but only in unpacked apps loaded from the file system. Right click is blocked in an app downloaded from Chrome Web Store. At least in Chrome 28 (both stable and beta) both on Ubuntu and Windows. – Gene Vayngrib Jun 23 '13 at 04:07
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    @GeneVayngrib It does if you enable the flag "Enable debugging for packed apps" in about:flags – mangini Jun 24 '13 at 10:10
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    @mangini, thanks for the about:flags flag to enable this functionality for apps from the Chrome App Store -- VERY useful. – delfuego Jul 03 '13 at 18:16
  • @mangini many thanks for the about:flags tip! Packaged Apps are finally going to help us write web apps that can compete with the native apps without using the native wrappers. Especially crucial for us is the push notifications, to wake up the app that is not even running. Can't wait to see Packaged Apps on Android. Any timeframe for that, if you do not mind sharing? – Gene Vayngrib Jul 09 '13 at 05:10
  • @GeneVayngrib, there are people working with Cordova to support Chrome Apps APIs in Android and iOS. You can follow the project and test the (very early, not production-ready, be warned :-)) code here: https://github.com/MobileChromeApps/mobile-chrome-apps – mangini Jul 15 '13 at 18:07
  • @mangini I looked at the MobileChromeApps and not sure if this is for real. May be I am missing something. Are they trying to recreate the whole chrome packaged apps setup on top of the seriously outdated and not evolving android webkit component? This can't be right. Not to mention the number of APIs supported by this project is minimal and not even close to what we need. Tell me there is some other project in works that gives more hope. – Gene Vayngrib Jul 21 '13 at 07:09
  • I have enabled multiple user accounts on chrome. Any tips on how to get this to work with that feature? I've logged in to both users in chrome and enabled "debugging for packed apps" on both of them, but my suspicion is the packed app is not running under either user and i can't access `chrome://flags` for the user that the _packed_ app is running under. Can I see these settings in an sqlite db somewhere? – Luke Mar 13 '17 at 17:29
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I've been able to right click the content area and inspect an element to get the dev tools to come up.

ddumont
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