Accessing Google Drive from a Firefox extension

Question

It is possible though, depending on the use case, it might also of limited interest.

Firefox ships with a tiny http server, just the bare bones. It is included for test purposes but this is not a reason to overlook it.

Lets follow the quickstart guide for running a Drive app in Javascript

The tricky part is to set the Redirect URIs and the Javascript Origins. Obviously the right setting is http://localhost, but how can you be sure that every user has port 80 available?

You can’t and, unless you have control over your users, no port is guaranteed to work for everyone. With this in mind lets choose port 49870 and pray.

So now Redirect URIs and the Javascript Origins are set to http://localhost:49870

Assuming you use Add-on SDK, save the quickstart.html (remember to add your Client ID) in the data directory of your extension. Now edit your main.js

const self = require("sdk/self");
const { Cc, Ci } = require("chrome");
const tabs = require("sdk/tabs");
const httpd = require("sdk/test/httpd");

var quickstart = self.data.load("quickstart.html");

var srv = new httpd.nsHttpServer();

srv.registerPathHandler("/gdrive", function handler(request, response){
  response.setHeader("Content-Type", "text/html; charset=utf-8", false);

  let converter = Cc["@mozilla.org/intl/scriptableunicodeconverter"].createInstance(Ci.nsIScriptableUnicodeConverter);
  converter.charset = "UTF-8";
  response.write(converter.ConvertFromUnicode(quickstart));
})

srv.start(49870);

tabs.open("http://localhost:49870/gdrive");

exports.onUnload = function (reason) {
  srv.stop(function(){});
};

Notice that quickstart.html is not opened as a local file, with a resource: URI. The Drive API wouldn’t like that. It is served at the url http://localhost:49870/gdrive. Needless to say that instead of static html we can use a template or anything else. Also the http://localhost:49870/gdrive can be scripted with a regular PageMod.

I don’t consider this a real solution. It’s just better than nothing.

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