Linking a native application inside box and a Firefox extension

[IkelAtomig]

Hi All,

Came across distrobox, I wanted to use freedownloadmanager but there is no official packages for rpm. That's for another day.

I installed freedownloadmanager in my Debian 12 Distrobox, if you are going to try this. Please install the following packages :

sudo apt --fix-broken install
sudo apt install xdg-utils ffmpeg libgstreamer1.0-0 apt-get install libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-0

and do sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales and choose en-US.UTF-8

Then proceed.

I then installed freedownloadmanager extension in firefox and tried but it didn't capture my downloads. After help with AI. I know, I didn't intend to but it speeded up things.

Under /home/user/.mozilla/native-messaging-hosts/org.freedownloadmanager.fdm5.cnh.json, it had

{
  "allowed_extensions": [
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]"
  ],
  "description": "Free Download Manager",
  "name": "org.freedownloadmanager.fdm5.cnh",
  "path": "\/opt\/freedownloadmanager\/wenativehost",
  "type": "stdio"
}

Since the path doesn't exist on host it doesn't work.

So, with the help of Perplexity, there were several approaches,

use a .sh file located in HOME directory and add the path above. The .sh file contained

#!/bin/bash
if [ -n "$1" ]; then
  distrobox enter debian -- /opt/freedownloadmanager/fdm "$1"
else
  distrobox enter debian -- /opt/freedownloadmanager/fdm
fi

This is actually good approach I think. But problem is the argument received by the app is not the URL rather file:///home/user/.mozilla/native-messaging-hosts/org.freedownloadmanager.fdm5.cnh.json Whatever I tried with it.

If this starts to happen and wrong argument is received, the .json is reset to the default state after some 'n' number of times.

I can't use Flatpak cuz nobody stepping in as maintainer and actual maintainer is inactive.