See DevTools APIs summary for general introduction to using Developer Tools APIs.

Overview

Each extension panel and sidebar is displayed as a separate HTML page. All extension pages displayed in the Developer Tools window have access to all modules in chrome.devtools API, as well as to chrome.extension API. Other extension APIs are not available to the pages within Developer Tools window, but you may invoke them by sending a request to the background page of your extension, similarly to how it's done in the content scripts.

You can use the $ref:devtools.panels.setOpenResourceHandler method to install a callback function that handles user requests to open a resource (typically, a click on a resource link in the Developer Tools window). At most one of the installed handlers gets called; users can specify (using the Developer Tools Settings dialog) either the default behavior or an extension to handle resource open requests. If an extension calls setOpenResourceHandler() multiple times, only the last handler is retained.

Examples

The following code adds a panel contained in Panel.html, represented by FontPicker.png on the Developer Tools toolbar and labeled as Font Picker:

chrome.devtools.panels.create("Font Picker",
                              "FontPicker.png",
                              "Panel.html"
                              function(panel) { ... });

The following code adds a sidebar pane contained in Sidebar.html and titled Font Properties to the Elements panel, then sets its height to 8ex:

chrome.devtools.panels.elements.createSidebarPane("Font Properties",
    function(sidebar) {
      sidebar.setPage("Sidebar.html");
      sidebar.setHeight("8ex");
    });

This screenshot demonstrates the effect the above examples would have on Developer Tools window:

You can find examples that use this API in Samples.