One of the things I do frequently at work is creating Chrome extensions to modify websites that have no api. I’ve explored several test suites that can do this but a Chrome extension with JavaScript and old jQuery seem to work the best. The problem I’ve been facing is doing thi autonomously because some of these things need to run when the office is empty and I really enjoy having days off where I’m not having to sign into work to trigger extensions.
Yesterday I figured out that you can launch Chrome with different profiles from a a shell script. Each Chrome Profile can have it’s own extensions enabled. This means that with 1 install of Chrome and different profiles for each task that needs to run I can trigger extensions using cron jobs. This also works with Chromium so it can work on a Linux box as well. It’s not headless but that’s ok. It’s the results that matter and it works.
All in all I’m pretty pleased with myself for figuring it out. Good job me!