How to show the inspector within your WKWebView based desktop app?

objective-c macos webkit wkwebview webkit2
Koen Bok picture Koen Bok · Aug 8, 2014 · Viewed 13.9k times · Source

I'm looking for a way to show the inspector for a WKWebView inside my Mac app.

With WebKit1 and WebView it was easy to show the inspector inside your Mac app, by just setting WebKitDeveloperExtras to true in your UserDefaults. That would give you an "Inspect Element" menu in every web view.

But in WebKit2 with WKWebView this is not working anymore. In the WWDC14 inspector session they explain that you have to add an entitlement and can then show the inspector from the Safari developer menu. This only works if you are the developer.

I looked through the private headers and found _allowsRemoteInspection which makes me think you can somehow launch an inspector and connect to it, but I'm not sure where to go from there.

Although I'm hoping for an official way to do this, my app is not in the AppStore, so I'm ok with using private stuff.

Answer

Drazen Mokic picture Drazen Mokic · Aug 26, 2015

For Swift, instead of building a bridging header you can set it directly

self.webView.configuration.preferences.setValue(true, forKey: "developerExtrasEnabled")

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