This week, Google released an extension called BITE which lets you file bug reports from within Chrome (or Chromium). If you are testing web applications, it lets you attach screenshots and/or automated tests to reproduce the bug you've found.

There's just one small catch: they haven't released a server to go with the client. Oops. Apparently the internal systems are too tightly integrated to make that possible.

I have hacked up enough stubs of a BITE server in Perl to get the client to "log in" and show off some features. (Warning: it doesn't actually do anything useful yet.)

So far, I have learnt:

  • To get BITE to point at your dev server, you need to edit bite.options.constants.ServerChannelOption in the file src/options/constants.js (as documented on the serverhandlers wiki page) before compiling it.
  • To get a bug template to apply to all URLs, you need to use the string 'all' as the URL, which is hardcoded in 'templates.js' in the client.