Installing Cardful

A Chrome extension. No developer tools required to use it — only to build it yourself.

If you just want to use it

Cardful is not on the Chrome Web Store yet. Until it is, it installs the way any unpacked extension does, which takes about a minute:

1. Get cardful-extension-vX.Y.Z.zip. If somebody sent you a copy, that is the file. Otherwise build it yourself — see the next section, which needs no more than Node and one command.
2. Unzip it anywhere you like.
3. Open chrome://extensions in Chrome.
4. Turn on Developer mode (top-right toggle).
5. Click Load unpacked and select the unzipped folder.
6. Pin it: click the puzzle-piece icon in the toolbar, then the pin next to Cardful.

The first click asks which cards you carry. After that it goes straight to an answer, and on a shopping site it recognizes it names the store too.

Chrome shows unpacked extensions a warning banner on every start, and "Developer mode" sounds more alarming than it is — it is the same mechanism every extension uses before it is published, and it is temporary. Nothing about the install changes what the extension does: it still sends nothing anywhere, which is the point of the privacy policy.

If you would rather wait for the Web Store version, or you hit any of this and it does not work, email keys@cardful.xyz and a person will answer.

If you would rather build it

git clone <this repository>
cd BestCCSelector

npm ci                     # exact dependency versions from the lockfile
npm run build:extension    # writes extension/dist

Then, in chrome://extensions, Load unpacked and select extension/dist.

To also produce the installable zip:

npm run package:extension   # or: npm run build:all

That writes dist/cardful-extension-vX.Y.Z.zip.

Publishing it to the Chrome Web Store

Worth doing if you want people to install it in one click instead of five. The walkthrough lives in PUBLISHING.md in the repository — registration, the listing fields, the permission justifications to paste into the dashboard, and what to do for later updates.

Rebuilding everything from scratch

Verified working from a clean clone:

git clone <this repository>
cd BestCCSelector

npm ci                     # exact dependency versions from the lockfile
npm run build:all          # extension + installable zip

Continuous integration runs this on every push, so a broken build shows up immediately rather than the next time someone clones the repository.

Requirements