Chrome has no update channel for an unpacked extension, so every pull left one manual step: click reload on its card. The dashboard now publishes the version its own checkout ships at /api/autobuyer/status, and the extension reloads itself when it is behind — chrome.runtime.reload() re-reads the folder from disk, which the update check has already pulled into. It only ever runs code that is on disk, so a reload that changes nothing is reported and waited out rather than repeated; a dashboard that is behind is ignored. Also adds the deploy stack for running the dashboard on the droplet, next to the autotrader one: it joins that nginx's network and renders a server block into its conf.d rather than standing up a second ingress. AUTOFIRMER_DB moves the SQLite file onto a volume, since the working directory in a container is replaced on every deploy. And waitFor gained `hidden`: an absent gate matched on DOM presence only, so a modal that closes by going display:none could never satisfy it. The extension grew a visibility probe for this — locate cannot answer it, because absent and hidden are both errors there and a wait gate has to tell them apart. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
AutoFirmer Capture (Chromium extension)
Scrapes the firm tab you are looking at and posts its HTML back to the dashboard. There is no on/off switch for that — see Scope below for what limits it instead.
Install (unpacked)
- Start the dashboard (
npm run dev) sohttp://localhost:3000is up. - Open
chrome://extensions, enable Developer mode (top right). - Load unpacked → select this
extension/folder. - Click the extension icon to open the popup and set:
- Dashboard URL — default
http://localhost:3000. Use the VPS IP if the dashboard runs elsewhere. - Poll interval — seconds between status checks (default 3).
- Element selector — optional CSS selector; matching elements get their on-screen position measured alongside the HTML.
- Dashboard URL — default
The badge shows ! (red) if the dashboard is unreachable, and nothing otherwise
— blank is the working state. Open the popup for what the last tick actually did.
Flow
extension --GET /api/autobuyer/status--> { pendingLocate }
extension --POST /api/autobuyer/capture-> html + viewport + element rects
AutoBuyer page --GET /api/autobuyer/capture-> renders the HTML
Nothing in that loop is switchable. Every tick serves any queued clicks and then captures the tab you are on.
Scope
Capture has no switch, so scope is what keeps it honest. Three limits, all enforced by Chrome rather than by this code:
host_permissionsis deliberately narrow — the firm sites plus localhost for the dashboard. The extension is technically incapable of reading any other site, so an accidental capture of your bank or mail tab cannot happen however the logic here is changed.- Only the tab you are on.
pickTab()asks for the active tab of the last-focused window and a host_permissions match. A firm tab sitting in the background is not captured, and neither is anything else. Switch away and capture simply stops until you switch back. - One content script, same hosts.
captcha-hook.jsruns at document_start on the firm sites only. It wrapsturnstile.render/grecaptcha.render/hcaptcha.renderand remembers what the page passed them — the sitekey, and above all the callback a solved token has to be handed to, which a programmatically rendered widget puts nowhere else. It reads nothing else and sends nothing anywhere; the remembered arguments stay in the page's own world until asolveCaptchastep comes to collect them.
To automate a different broker, add its pattern to host_permissions in
manifest.json and reload the extension — that alone scopes capture to it. Avoid
going back to <all_urls>: it would put every tab you visit in reach, and limit
1 is the only thing standing between this and scraping your whole browser. A new
firm needs its host in both lists — host_permissions and the content_scripts
matches — or captchas on that site will have no callback to fire.
Notes
- The extension never captures the dashboard's own pages — otherwise it would just mirror its own output back.
chrome://,about:and Web Store pages cannot be scripted by any extension; they're skipped.- MV3 service workers are torn down when idle. Each poll makes an extension API call, which keeps the worker alive; a 30-second alarm revives it if Chrome kills it anyway. So worst-case cadence is 30s, normal cadence is the poll interval.