Firefox OS Manifest .htaccess Handler

By  on  

Want to know one of the secrets why Firefox OS is so incredibly awesome?  If you've created your website correctly, i.e. using CSS media queries (responsive design) and JavaScript feature detection, you can simply add an app.manifest file at the root of your domain and you've instantly created a Firefox OS app!  Of course you'll then want to list your app in the Firefox Marketplace.  The most frequent problem developers run into is with their app.manifest file not being served correctly.  With an update to the .htaccess file of the hosted app, that problem can go away!

The .htacess Code

The problem is that the manifest.webapp file isn't being served properly, so an AddType is the key:

AddType application/x-web-app-manifest+json .webapp

The .htaccess snippet above ensures that the manifest is served correctly, thus eliminating the annoying manifest error and letting you get your app listed on the Marketplace!

Recent Features

  • By
    How to Create a Twitter Card

    One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook.  Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...

  • By
    Create a CSS Cube

    CSS cubes really showcase what CSS has become over the years, evolving from simple color and dimension directives to a language capable of creating deep, creative visuals.  Add animation and you've got something really neat.  Unfortunately each CSS cube tutorial I've read is a bit...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    “Top” Watermark Using MooTools

    Whenever you have a long page worth of content, you generally want to add a "top" anchor link at the bottom of the page so that your user doesn't have to scroll forever to get to the top. The only problem with this method is...

  • By
    Dijit’s TabContainer Layout:  Easy Tabbed Content

    One of Dojo's major advantages over other JavaScript toolkits is its Dijit library.  Dijit is a UI framework comprised of JavaScript widget classes, CSS files, and HTML templates.  One very useful layout class is the TabContainer.  TabContainer allows you to quickly create a tabbed content...

Discussion

  1. In my nginx config manifest listed as(taken from mime.types file):
    text/cache-manifest manifest;
    If based on your example it would be:
    application/x-web-app-manifest+json manifest

  2. Stanton Moreland

    This is a really helpful post as I was looking to add my app on the Firefox marketplace for some time now. I am going to check it out soon! Since I am huge fan of Firefox Add-on Builder and SDK, I want you to check this blog post regarding developing Firefox add-ons.

    http://groupdocs.com/blog/tech-blog/archive/2013/02/01/developing-firefox-add-ons-with-the-add-on-builder-and-sdk.html

    I use GroupDocs viewer plugin for Firefox and it has good performance for a browser-based app but this add-on post has me confused. Hoping to hear from you on this!

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!