Chrome says my extension's manifest file is missing or unreadable

I'm a new chrome extension developer, and I was going through the Chrome tutorial on making a "Hello World" extension, here's my code:

 { "name": "My First Extension", "version": "1.0", "manifest_version": 2, "description": "The first extension that I made.", "browser_action": { "default_icon": "icon.png" }, "permissions": [ "" ] }

When I went to load the unpacked extension it said the manifest file was missing or unreadable. Yes I have the image in a folder with it and it is correctly named manifest.json

3

9 Answers

Something that commonly happens is that the manifest file isn't named properly. Double check the name (and extension) and be sure that it doesn't end with .txt (for example).

In order to determine this, make sure you aren't hiding file extensions:

1. Open Windows Explorer
2. Go to Folder and Search Options > View tab
3. Uncheck Hide extensions for known file types

Also, note that the naming of the manifest file is, in fact, case sensitive, i.e. manifest.json != MANIFEST.JSON.

1

My problem was slightly different.

By default Eclipse saved my manifest.json as an ANSI encoded text file.

Solution:

• Open in Notepad
• File -> Save As
• select UTF-8 from the encoding drop-down in the bottom left.
• Save

1

I also encountered this issue.

My problem was that I renamed the folder my extension was in, so all I had to do was delete and reload the extension.

Thought this might help some people out there.

1

Mine also was funny. While copypasting " manifest.json" from the tutorial, i also managed to copy a leading space. Couldn't get why it's not finding it.

If you are downloading samples from developer.chrome.com its possible that your actual folder is contained in a folder with the same name and this is creating a problem. For example your extracted sample extension named tabCapture will lool like this:

C:\Users\...\tabCapture\tabCapture

Some permissions issue for default sample.

I wanted to see how it works, I am creating the first extension, so I downloaded a simpler one.

Downloaded 'Typed URL History' sample from

which can be found at

this worked great, hope it helps

Kindly check whether you have installed right version of ChromeDriver or not . In my case , installing correct version helped.

In my case it was the problem of building the extension, I was pointing at an extension src (with manifest and everything) but without a build.

If you run into this scenario runnpm ithennpm build

On Linux (fedora) I was able to solve the problem by changing the path to the folder.

By default, it selected ~/path-to-folderI thus forced it to use /home/user/path-to-folder