How to Get Started

This section describes how MailVis is build after you cloned the MailVis repository. It also describes briefly how to set up MailVis for development. You will acquire to install Node.js to use NPM commands.

Dependencies and building

Before the plugin can be installed into the browser the plugin has to be build. For that, all dependencies have to be fetched (node modules) first. After that, the dependencies are bundled together with the files from the MailVis repository. In order to do that run the following command in the MailVis repository:

cd src && npm install

The command “npm install” will install the needed dependencies. After that, “npm run build” is executed automatically which will build the plugin. During the build Browserify will bundle all files into bundles. Now the plugin can be installed in Chrome.

Install MailVis in Chrome

Once the plugin was successfully build, it can be installed correctly in Chrome.

  1. Go to: chrome://extensions/
  2. In the top right enable Developer Mode
  3. In the top left select “Load unpacked”
  4. Select the “src” folder containing the manifest file
  5. Accept the permissions for the plugin and finish the installation

After the installation is complete open Gmail. If the plugin was successfully installed, a dashboard tab should appear like in the following screenshot:

Developing MailVis

The following command should be executed when working on future updates for MailVis:

npm run development

This will run Browserify in watch mode. This means Browserify will update a bundle whenever a file that belongs to the bundle is changed.