Publishing a G Suite Add-on
The process to publish a G Suite Add-on is supper confusing. You can see a lot of questions asked without proper answer. I hope that Google is on the way making it right. Meanwhile, I am noting this down for anyone who currently struggle publishing an G Suite Add-on.
In my case, I need to publish an Add-on for Google Sheet which is written in Apps Script. The Add-on added more functionalities such as retrieve information directly from BigQuery and pivot into the sheet. By design, it should be published to users within our domain only.
Before we begin, there are somethings that we should be clear:
- There are two types of G Suite Add-ons: The Gmail Add-ons, for Gmail, of course. And the editor Add-ons, for the rest of G Suite applications such as Google Sheet, Docs, Form.. (I know, the name is pretty confusing).
- There are two places to publish the Add-on to. And this is where the real confusion is:
The G Suite Marketplace: Look at it’s name, we can easily guess this is the place we are going to publish G Suite Add-ons, right? Not really, it is only true for Gmail Add-ons. For the editor Add-ons, we also need to publish to the one below.
The Chrome Web Store: Ok, We don’t create Chrome extension, why on earth I have to publish my G Suite Add-on to this store? Isn’t the whole idea of of G Suite Add-ons is to add functionality to the G Suite application itself, not the browser? Take a look at the document, I guess they’re trying to making it right, and eventually G Suite add-ons should be published on Suite Marketplace only. But for now, we still need to publish the editor add on to two places.
OK, let start publishing the editor add-on
This is actually the easy part, after you clear the confusions above. All you need to do is follow the instruction. Below are important steps with my notes:
Switch to a standard GCP Project. You must create a GCP project and link it to the Apps Script project. Go to Resources -> Cloud Platform Project…
Enable the Marketplace SDK for the GCP project and have it configured properly. This is important, I have missed this step and being frustrated for hours not knowing why I can’t get the Add-ons visible on the G Suite Marketplace.
Note: Ignore the “Publish” section. Yes, do not touch that section, it’s only for Gmail Add-ons. For editor add-on you need to publish it in Chrome Web Store, not here. To me, it looks like a trap (that I actually fell into). Really, why I need to configure everything here only to publish it somewhere else?
Configure and publish on the Chrome Web Store listing. Yes, as I mentioned earlier, we need to configure both listings on both the “market” and the “store”. And this is where you actually do the publishing.
After you configured the Marketplace SKD, you can go to the Apps Script project, Publish -> Deploy as Add-on…
By finishing this screen, it’ll lead you to the Chrome Web Store. If you doing it right, all the information you configured in the Marketplace SDK should appear here as well. All you need to do is to press Publish, and wait for few minutes for it to be visible on the store and the market.
In my case, I select Private for the Visibility options because the add-on is specific for our business. As described in the document, private listing does not require approval from Google, but the public listing does. However, as I experimented, It’s not quite true. Despite the selected option, it’ll be available to user after few minutes.
