Launch Chrome and Load a Local Extension

There are over 1,000 command-line switches to the chrome executable. This particular switch allowed me to load an extension from the command line by giving it a path to the unpacked extension.

chrome.exe --load-extension=C:ChromeExtensionsHotVirtualKeyboard1.1.0

Unpacking the extension itself is for a different day… but some quick notes on that. To find the extension directory, I first needed the extension ID. In Chrome, I navigated to chrome://extensions/. Under each extension, there is an ID: field with a string representing that extension’s ID which correlates to the following path:

%LOCALAPPDATA%GoogleChromeUser DataDefaultExtensionsextensionstringhere