Opening a Browser with DevTools Open by Default

chrome devtools

While automating some parts of my development workflow, I was wondering if there was a way of opening a browser with DevTools open by default. This would save me a few clicks and small tweaks like this are always helpful.

And it turns out that it is possible! All I needed was a command-line flag to be passed in when opening Google Chrome. The flag to be passed is --auto-open-devtools-for-tabs and can be passed as:

/Applications/Google\ Chrome\ Canary.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome\ Canary --auto-open-devtools-for-tabs https://wisdomgeek.com

Bash

The –auto-open-devtools flag opens the browser tab for the URL with the DevTools open. Having the devtools open up by default can be handy for many things, including setting up your web development workflows!

Saransh Kataria

Born in Delhi, India, Saransh Kataria is the brain behind Wisdom Geek. Currently, Saransh is a software developer at a reputed firm in Austin, and he likes playing with new technologies to explore different possibilities. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science. He also shares his passion for sharing knowledge as the community lead at Facebook Developer Circle Delhi, NCR which is a developer community in Delhi, India.