Google provides a free hosting service: the Extensions gallery. Another option is hosting your extension on other servers, instead of or in addition to using Google's gallery. This page gives tips for using the gallery, as well as details on how to host extensions on your own server.

Publishing to the Extensions gallery

Publishing to the gallery is easy, but your extension might be more popular if you take a little time to prepare:

• Visit the gallery and look at similar extensions' pages. Your extension's page should look at least as good as theirs.
• Consider creating a support site for your extension, maybe a Google Group. If your extension's page has a link to your support site, people will be less likely to complain in the user comments.
• Consider creating a custom Gmail account for this extension or for all of your extensions. Only one account can upload, publish, and update your extension.
• Create some great text (titles and descriptions) and images (maybe even video) for your extension. See the gallery help for details on screenshot and text requirements.

To upload your extension, just zip up your extension's directory, go to the Developer Dashboard, and add your extension. This creates a page for your extension, viewable only by you. Now you can edit your extension's page — uploading images, specifying text, and so on.

Once you verify that your extension's page looks good and all links are valid, publish your extension.

When you want to update your extension, use the dashboard to upload and publish the new version. Your users will automatically get the new version over the next few hours.

Hosting on your own server

By convention, extensions are served — whether by the gallery or by a custom server — as .crx files. When you upload an extension to the gallery, the gallery creates the .crx file for you. If you aren't using the gallery, you need to create the .crx file yourself, as described in Packaging.

Note: If you do your own hosting, don't forget to set up autoupdate, so you can be sure that your extension's users have the latest version.

A server that hosts extensions must use appropriate HTTP headers, so that users can install your extension by clicking a link to it.

Google Chrome considers a file to be an extension if either of the following is true:

• The file has the content type application/x-chrome-extension
• The file suffix is .crx and both of the following are true:
  • The file is not served with the HTTP header X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
  • The file is served with one of the following content types:
    • empty string
    • "text/plain"
    • "application/octet-stream"
    • "unknown/unknown"
    • "application/unknown"
    • "*/*"

The most common reason for failing to recognize an extension is that the server sends the header X-Content-Type-Options: no sniff. The second most common reason is that the server sends an unknown content type — one that isn't in the previous list. To fix an HTTP header issue, either change the configuration of the server or try hosting the extension at another server.