URLHelperApp

A helper app for script-driven routing of http(s) urls to different applications.

Why

macOS has quite limited configuration of url “openers” - it’s mostly limited to one app per url scheme. So (by default) it can not route an http(s) url to different apps, depending on the url itself.

Some time ago I discovered the concept of user-generated Chrome SSBs/Epichrome and believe that those are really cool things - I use them daily and they work great. But when opening an url from other app, that is not browser (read: Mail/iMessage/Slack/Messenger and etc.) to benefit from SSBs, we need to route the url accordingly.

URLHelperApp is a possible solution.

How

URLHelperApp is basically a very simple “url proxy” app. You configure it as default browser/http(s) handler, and adjust the routing using a simple script, that you’re free to adjust to your needs yourself. After that, when you try to open an url:

1. URLHelperApp gets the url.
2. URLHelperApp invokes the “routing” script with the url as an argument.
3. The script (currently) outputs the bundle id of the desired app/SSB.
4. URLHelper asks the app with the bundle to open the url.

The routings script (AppBundleIdentifierForURL) should be installed in ~/Library/Application Scripts/com.grigorye.URLHelperApp/. A sample version of the script is installed on attempt to open an url (by default it routes everything to Chrome).

Alternatives

Before creating this tool I was using Browser Fairy. Unfortunately it doesn’t currently (Oct 2018) work on macOS 10.14 Mojave and I have some problems with it on macOS 10.13. From my experience, URLHelperApp already works more reliably and a bit faster than that app (leaving aside the flexibility).

Installation

Build it yourself or (preferably) install via Homebrew:

brew tap grigorye/tools
brew cask install url-helper-app

Known limitations/bugs/todos

Please see Trello.