Migrating add-on from self-hosted to AMO

Boy, is distributing Firefox add-ons a nightmare compared to Chrome…

Anyway, here is my situation:

I have a few add-ons that AOM previously have refused to host due to (stupid) regulations against products intended for “closed user groups”. So I had to host these myself.

Now, in July of last year, I had an email from AOM saying they have (at long last) reversed this idiotic policy. So now I am trying to get these add-ons published on AOM.

How do I do this? Here is as far as I’ve come:

I have managed to use web-ext sign to create a signed version of my add-on, with a new version number. When trying to do that, I got an error message saying that the argument –amo-metadata was not recognised, so I skipped that. The result was that the program complained about missing metadata (:@) and said I would have to add them at the website when uploading the signed .xpi file. Okay, move on.

Next step was to upload the file to AOM. When I attempted that (on the page Client Challenge ), I got the following error message: “Duplicate add-on ID found.” I have read somewhere that new versions of a previously uploaded add-on should not have an ID stated in the manifest. Okay, so I removed the ID from the manifest and ran web-ext sign again. Result: failure to create signed file. Following the URL given in the error message, I could read that the error was due to that “The add-on ID is required in Manifest Version 3 and above”. Then I put back the ID in the manifest (and changed the version number), the signing procedure again worked.

So how do I get past this impasse? web-ext sign won’t accept a manifest without add-on ID, and AOM won’t accept one with the ID. Please enlighten me how I should do here.

Maybe this is down to my old OS? I am running MacOS 12.7.6 on a MacBook Pro from 2015. Firefox Developer Edition 149.0b5; web-ext v 7.1.0.

Turns out I made a simple mistake – but maybe others have mad it too, so here it is: under “Manage Status & Versions”, I chose “Upload a New Version”, which directed me to the page …/versions/submit/. Here, under “Where to Host Version”, one should click the rather tiny link “Change” in order to get the new version hosted on AMO (if self-hosted earlier). I missed that, which led to my previous rant…

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