Unpredictable checksum

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#3,613 9 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
48/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
javascript
Domain
build-system, cli

Research direction

Start by reproducing the npm exec web-ext -- build --overwrite-dest --source-dir=distribution -a . -n package.zip command with the same unchanged distribution directory, then inspect which ZIP metadata changes between runs. Done means repeated builds produce byte-identical package.zip files and the same md5sum.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

contrib: good first bug

Hello,

Here is the command I run:

npm exec web-ext -- build --overwrite-dest --source-dir=distribution -a . -n package.zip
md5sum package.zip

Everytime I run this command (without changing anything in distribution), the checksum (a priori containing some file modification timestamps) will be different.

However paradoxically, extension stores, like the Firefox store, will ask developers to provide steps to build the extension package and require it to produce the exact same checksum as the ZIP that you submitted.

How can I build a ZIP for my extension that would always produce the exact same ZIP?

Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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