How can I send a message from Google Chrome extension to desktop application?

Question

I have a Windows desktop application which must work in collaboration with my Chrome extension.

Can I send a message to my desktop app somehow from Google Chrome extension?

Which IPC objects can I use?

Answer 1

I see three options:

1. You could use the internet. You can have a remote service that both the chrome extension and your desktop app talk to, to communicate.
2. You could have your desktop app have a simple server built into it so that the chrome extension can make local http requests to it to communicate with it.
3. Use the Google NPAPI plugin functionality to have full access to the computer. Now deprecated

Answer 2

These days you would use Chrome's native messaging API to send the message from your extension to a native messaging host. The latter can be a "real" executable that then passes the message on to your desktop application.

Documentation: http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/messaging#native-messaging-host

Answer 3

This almost certainly requires a custom NPAPI plugin and cannot be done with the basic extension API. NPAPI development is fairly daunting and outside my area of expertise, but feel free to read over Google's documentation on the subject.

As an alternative, perhaps you can have your desktop application poll the internals of the extension. For example, the extension's could have a file in its sandboxed filesystem where it leaves messages for the desktop application to find. This approach is suboptimal, since it requires polling instead of pushing, but it does save you the hassle of coding an NPAPI plugin.

Answer 4

chrome extension has a native massage api to communicate to native process,

see here:

https://developer.chrome.com/apps/nativeMessaging