Is it possible to auto-update a chrome extension published on the chrome web store?

Question

The docs are very unclear about this. I get that you can autoupdate your extension by bumping the version number if you self host your extension. However what I don\'t know is i

Answer 1

There is now a way to update extensions hosted in CWS programmatically (since March 2014) by using Webstore API.

After registering for the API and authorizing through OAuth 2.0, you can push an update for an existing item:

curl \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN"  \
-H "x-goog-api-version: 2" \
-X PUT \
-T $FILE_NAME \
-v \
https://www.googleapis.com/upload/chromewebstore/v1.1/items/$APP_ID

Documentation is not clear whether this creates a draft or not; in any case, publishing is also possible through the API.

Please note that it will still be subject to automatic review checks, so the actual update will only be available after they complete (usually under an hour).