How to modify Chrome ExtensionInstallWhitelist?

Question

I am trying to install extensions on Chrome but it seems to "decide" for me what I should and should not install, which is very frustrating. I have navigated to the "chrome://policy/" and the ExtensionInstallBlacklist is set to "*", how can I change this or add my extensions ID's to the ExtensionInstallWhitelist array? I cannot find this file anywhere on my machine (MAC) and I have looked everywhere including as I found in other threads as a /Library/Managed Preferences/username/. How can I modify the policy settings?

Answer 1

Then I would suggest contacting your administrator. This setting is put into your machine by a workgroup policy.

Even if you were able to change the value locally, it's in place for a reason, and you may get in trouble for that.

Note that you would need a local administrator to access the file. According to the docs, it should indeed be in /Library/Managed Preferences/<username>. And modifying it will not help in the long term.

Answer 2

Only for MacOS
Google Chrome restricts installing 3rd-party extensions for better security. The official method to bypass such limitation is to add custom policy. In current version (60) of Chrome, there is a policy entry for whitelisting extension called ExtensionInstallWhitelist. On macOS, one can easily add such policy by running the following command in Terminal:

defaults write com.google.Chrome ExtensionInstallWhitelist -array id

Replace id with your actual extension ID correspondingly. The ID can be found in chrome://extensions by clicking the “Developer mode” box. If you want to add multiple IDs, put id1 id2 id3, etc. after -array. Restart Chrome to take effect. To check if the policy works, visit chrome://policy. To remove the policy, simply run:

defaults delete com.google.Chrome ExtensionInstallWhitelist

This could help install open-source Chrome extensions such as BaiduExporter without warning.

Original source