How to Use Chrome Developer Tools JavaScript Source Snippets

We already know that we can run custom JavaScript code from the console. I explained that in this blog post.

And we can use Google Chrome Code snippets to reuse that code over time.

By default, we can’t import and export, but people have written helpful code to let us do that as well.

Google Chrome Snippets

The Google Chrome Snippets tool allows you to store short ‘snippets’ of JavaScript code in the dev tools, rather than having to copy and paste into the console all the time.

https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/debug/snippets/?hl=en

If you right click on a snippet you can ‘run’ it.

Remember to hit  ctrl+s to save it, you’ll know if it is saved because it will no longer have the ‘*’ next to it.

Collections of Snippets

You can find collections of other people’s snippets online.

• https://bgrins.github.io/devtools-snippets/
• https://github.com/bgrins/devtools-snippets RSS
• https://github.com/bahmutov/code-snippetsRSS

Can We Import and Export Snippets?

If you Ctrl + Shift + I and open a ‘secondary’ Dev tools for the Dev Tools, then this gives you access to the snippets API.

E.g. stackoverflow.com/questions/34936456

InspectorFrontendHost.getPreferences(function(prefs) {
    console.log(prefs.scriptSnippets);});

We can import and export snippets using this gist:

gist.github.com/soundyogi/03df95505604c8351212

Copy and paste theraw gist into your ‘secondary’ dev tools. After you import, remember to ‘save to chrome’.

Summary

If you find yourself working from the console, then this is a really useful way to manage your code snippets. And having the ability to import and export allows you to keep your snippets clean and only have the snippets for the application you are testing.