Installing Gnome Shell Extensions Manually on Ubuntu

The Background

The usual method to install Gnome extensions on Ubuntu is using a browser with the relevant browser extension installed among other requirements. However, as in almost all things involving Linux, this method is not necessarily the only way toward accomplishing the same. What follows are the steps that may be followed to manually download and install the extensions without browser integration.

The Procedure

We can get started by navigating to the Gnome Extensions webpage¹, finding the extension we need installed, and downloading the extension package matching our Gnome shell version².

Once we have downloaded the zipped folder that contains the extension, we need to move the unzipped folder inside the ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/ directory to set up the extension for the current user. At the location mentioned previously, the folder containing the particular extension should be named by the UUID of that particular extension, which is included in the metadata.json residing within the extension’s folder as the value for the JSON³ key uuid.

Once the above steps are done, we can finally enable the particular extension with the following command (i.e. uuid-of-extension is the UUID from previous step).

gnome-extensions enable uuid-of-extension

Listing all enabled Gnome shell extensions shall be done with the following command.

gnome-extensions list # List enabled extensions

To disable a particular extension, the above command can be used with a disable argument instead of the enable used previously.