A site that provides GNOME Shell Extensions in a fashion similar to the GNOME Apps website.
Even if this project was made to make the extensions experience more smooth and good-looking, the official GNOME Extensions website is probably the one you are looking on as it actually works, and is operated by the GNOME team.
This project has a few quirks:
- It uses Deno (and Typescript hence)
- It uses the Fresh next-gen web framework
- It uses plain CSS (no SASS and/or transpilers).
- It accesses the GNOME Extensions API (undocumented, I don't know if it is even allowed to use the API but Extension Manager uses it so...)
- Does not work. This is a demo at least for now. It can't manage or install extensions (yet, until I figure out how to use the GNOME Extensions Add-on bindings)
If you are looking to contribute, here are a few things that would like to be implemented:
- Actually install apps.
- Add documentation (on how to use site)
- Add a large & legible warning that this site is not operated, endorsed and whatnot by the GNOME team (yet, I hope).
- Update the site's meta (favicon and title)
- Add metadata for GNOME extension pages (og-title, twitter-description) for SEO
- Add a footer (at the bottom of pages)
- Add Dark mode
The aforementioned undocumented GNOME extensions API only accepts HTTPS requests
from https://extensions.gnome.org. This means that in a browser, you can't
make requests to the API endpoints because of security reasons (CORS). This
means that all API calls have to be made through a simple proxy (located at
lib/api/proxy) and all this does is spoof the request and change the Origin
header to https://extensions.gnome.org/ to allow for the API endpoint to give
us results.
Annex can also use a dedicated proxy that serves the GNOME extensions website
without the CORS limitations by setting the ANNEX_PROXY_URL.
There are no plans on how it will work in the future but the proxy is a very good solution (and I hope, legal).
The project uses Deno (a Javascript runtime/environment, similar to Node & Bun but cooler 🦕) so it requires it to be installed. You can install Deno following instructions on the deno.land website.
You need to provide the URL environment variable, so that it can do requests
to the API proxy.
Start the project:
deno task start
This will watch the project directory and restart as necessary.