Let's say I have a JSON file stored within my extension called settings.json. I can get the URL of the file using:
chrome.extension.getURL("settings.json");
But now that I have the URL, how do I actually load the contents of that file so I can JSON.parse it and use it? The reason I'm doing this is that there is a server component, and I want to make deployment and testing on multiple servers easier (dev, staging, production, etc.) Alternatively if there's a way to add custom attributes to the manifest.json and access them, that would also work.
If you make your setting.js look like:
var settings = {"param":value,...};
Then you can just include it on a background page and use settings variable:
<script src="settings.js"></script>
If you want to have pure json in your file without assigning it to any variables then you can load it using XMLHttpRequest:
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.onreadystatechange = handleStateChange; // Implemented elsewhere.
xhr.open("GET", chrome.extension.getURL('/config_resources/config.json'), true);
xhr.send();
or if you included jquery into your project:
$.getJSON(chrome.extension.getURL('/config_resources/config.json'), function(settings) {
//..
});
(btw using chrome.extension.getURL
is required only if you are accessing a file from a content script, otherwise you can just use relative path /config_resources/config.json
)