I'm just making a simple chrome extension.

I want my background page(or part of ) to execute every 5 minutes, to get some data and display a desktop notification if any.How can I do this

I'm just making a simple chrome extension.

I want my background page(or part of ) to execute every 5 minutes, to get some data and display a desktop notification if any.How can I do this

• javascript
• google-chrome-extension

• howtocreate.co.uk/tutorials/javascript/timers – CloudyMarble Commented Dec 13, 2011 at 14:02

2 Answers 2

Important note: if you use a non-persistent background script (ManifestV3 service_worker or ManifestV2 Event page with "persistent": false in manifest.json), setInterval with a 5-minute interval will likely fail as the background script will get unloaded after the idle timeout (30 seconds) unless you were lucky to have your other chrome event listeners fire in-between or you intentionally kept the background script alive (MV3, MV2).

If your extension uses window.setTimeout() or window.setInterval(), switch to using the alarms API instead. DOM-based timers won't be honored if the event page shuts down.

In this case, you need to implement it using the chrome.alarms API:

chrome.alarms.create("5min", {
  delayInMinutes: 5,
  periodInMinutes: 5
});

// To ensure a non-persistent script wakes up, call this code at its start synchronously
chrome.alarms.onAlarm.addListener(function(alarm) {
  if (alarm.name === "5min") {
    doStuff();
  }
});

In case of persistent background pages, setInterval is still an acceptable solution. It should also work for short (on a scale of seconds, not minutes) intervals in a non-persistent script if you ensure the end is within the remainder of the idle timeout, see the above note.

One way to accomplish this would be:

setInterval(your_function, 5 * 60 * 1000)

Which would execute your_function every 5 minutes (5 * 60 * 1000 milliseconds = 5 minutes)