How can I update GNOME Shell extensions from the command line?

Question

Occassionally I get messages telling me there is an update for one of my GNOME Shell extensions, directing me to https://extensions.gnome.org/local/ where I can trigger an update through the web interface.

I would rather invoke updates from the command line, similar to calling apt update && apt upgrade. How can I do this?

Solution

The comments on this omgubuntu.co.uk article list two possible ways:

1. The GNOME Shell Extension Installer · Github, a bash script to install and search extensions from extensions.gnome.org. Install it with

   wget -O gnome-shell-extension-installer "https://github.com/brunelli/gnome-shell-extension-installer/raw/master/gnome-shell-extension-installer"
   chmod +x gnome-shell-extension-installer
   sudo mv gnome-shell-extension-installer /usr/bin/
   

Update the extensions 23 and 42 for GNOME Shell 3.18.4 with

    ids=( 23 42 )
    gnome=3.18.4
    gnome-shell-extension-installer ${ids[@]} $gnome --yes --update --restart-shell

Update all extensions with

    gnome-shell-extension-installer --yes --update --restart-shell

I couldn’t test it, but I’m pretty sure it’s scriptable.

1. If you installed your extensions by cloning their git repos to /path/ you can just git pull the repos one after one:

   for i in /path/*; do
     git -C "$i" pull
   done
   

After that you need to reload GNOME Shell with either Alt+F2 and r or the command gnome-shell -r.

Comments

[The Pizza Overlord]

You could utilise a cron job to extract shell extensions from the /etc/shells file, and run apt-get updates for each value - just one idea.

[Oli]

@ThePizzaOverlord These tend not to be packaged things and when they are, they're often superseded by the versions provided by Gnome directly.

[Peterino]

See gnome-shell issue #906 for a request to add this feature.

[eduncan911]

If you run gnome-shell-extension-install as sudo, it will install system-wide.