Quick Start Guide
Introduction
Welcome to the world of programmable instant autofill! Lightning Autofill does not magically autofill form fields for you. It’s a rule-based system where you define rules that match the fields you want to autofill. The rules tell Lightning Autofill what values to fill out or what actions to perform. Autofilling is the core functionality, but Lightning Autofill can do a lot of other things like automation using JavaScript, storing boilerplate text (text snippets), autocompletion, and backing up your form data as you type.
Try it out
To autofill your first form, visit the demo form. You should see most of the fields automatically filled out—congrats on your first autofill! 🥳 The autofilled values come from the “Sample address” profile. A profile is a collection of autofill rules that are executed in the order in which they are listed. Let’s take a look at this profile by opening the Lightning Autofill Options page. There are two ways to do this (🎞️ watch tutorial):
- Right-click on the extension’s lightning bolt icon in the toolbar and select “Options”. If you don’t see the icon in the toolbar, then look for an option to pin it so that it stays visible in the toolbar.
- Right-click anywhere on the web page and select Lightning Autofill → Options from the context menu.
The main table you see on the Form Fields tab is called the rules table. Each row in this table represents an autofill rule. This profile contains a set of generic address rules that match the autocomplete attribute, so they should work in a lot of forms out of the box. To prevent the sample address rules from executing on every page, the profile has a Site filter restricting the rules to only the greenido.github.io domain. For more practice, head over to the Practice Form to get familiar with manually creating rules in Lightning Autofill.
How rules work
When you land on a web page, Lightning Autofill looks through all of the rules in the active profile and executes rules where the text in the Name column matches the value of one of the supported attributes in a form field. Common attributes to match against are name and id. If there’s a match, then the form field is autofilled with the text in the Value column.
You may have noticed the strange-looking Name text in between the / slashes in the sample address rules. These are regular expressions (regex), a powerful text matching engine supported by Lightning Autofill. This allows you to match almost any form field you come across, even ones where the attribute values change on every load. You can sharpen your regex skills on regex101. If regex is not your cup of tea, then you can also target form fields using CSS selectors and XPaths.
Generating rules
For most forms that use standard HTML tags, Lightning Autofill should be able to generate the autofill rules for you, which is a lot faster than manually creating them yourself. To see this in action, follow these steps:
- After autofilling the demo form from above, right-click on the page and select Lightning Autofill → Add rules for this page.
- Let’s store the new rules in a different profile. Select “New” from the profile dropdown menu and give it the name “Practice”. The newly created profile will become the active profile. Profiles are a great way to organize your rules.
- Reload the demo form. You should see the form fields autofill using the new rules you just generated.
Next steps
Everyone starts with the Free plan, which is meant for casual form filling and is limited to 10 profile executions per day. You can see your remaining executions by hovering the mouse pointer over the Lightning Autofill extension icon. The execution limit is reset every day at midnight your local time. To unlock the full power of Lightning Autofill, we recommend upgrading to the Plus or Pro plan. 🚀
Questions? Ask @LightningAutofillPro, our AI assistant. It can help with everything from basic usage to writing JavaScript rules. Try prompts like:
How can I auto-click a form button?
For further assistance, join the support community on Discord. There you’ll be able to submit bug reports, request new features, and chat with other autofillers across the world.