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Gnome - Extensions - VPN Indicator

Displays if the system is connected to a VPN or not.

Create the directory for the extension

mkdir ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/vpn-indicator

Create a metadata.json file

metadata.json is a required file of every extension.

It contains basic information about the extension such as its UUID, name and description.

metadata.json

{
  "_author": "Peter Terence Roux, 2016",
  "description": "A VPN connection indicator.",
  "name": "VPN Indicator",
  "shell-version": [
    "1.00.1"
  ],
  "url": "",
  "uuid": "vpn-indicator",
  "version": 1
}

NOTE: Some fields are mandatory, but there are a number of other optional fields too:

Mandatory fields

uuid: This is the name of the directory where the extension is going to be installed.
- In this case ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/vpn-indicator.
- Officially the name should be a globally-unique identifier for your extension, made of two parts separated by @.
  - Each part must only container letters, numbers, period (.), underscore (_) and hyphen (-).
  - But this does work well using a UUID that does not contain the second part with @.

name: A short, descriptive string.

description: A relatively short description of the extension.
- Line breaks and tabs can be used with \n and \t escape sequences.

shell-version: The GNOME Shell versions this supports.
- An array of strings describing the GNOME Shell versions that an extension supports.
- It must include at least one entry or the extension will be uninstallable.
- For versions up to and including GNOME 3.38, this should have a major and minor component such as “3.38”.
  - Starting with GNOME 40, it should simply be the major version, such as “40” or “41”.

GNOME Shell has a configuration setting, disable-extension-version-validation, which controls whether unsupported extensions can be loaded. * Before GNOME 40 this was true by default (users could install extensions regardless of the shell-version), but because of the major changes it is now false by default.

url: A URL for the extension, which could point to where the code can be found and issues can be reported.

version: The version of the extension, as known to the GNOME Extensions website, and MUST be a whole number like 1.
- It is not a semantic version like 1.1 or a string like “1”.
- This version is automatically incremented by the GNOME Extensions website with each submission.

Other optional fields

  "session-modes": ["user", "unlock-dialog"],
  "settings-schema": "org.gnome.shell.extensions.example",
  "gettext-domain": "example@gjs.guide",

}

NOTE:

References

https://extensions.gnome.org/

http://smasue.github.io/gnome-shell-tw

https://gjs.guide/extensions/overview/anatomy.html#metadata-json-required

Wiki

Table of Contents

Gnome - Extensions - VPN Indicator

Create the directory for the extension

Create a metadata.json file

References