Your next shortcut
starts here.

01. Connect your instance

1. Install and follow the first-run setup.Install from the Chrome Web Store for Chromium browsers or Mozilla Add-ons for Firefox. A welcome page opens after a fresh install and walks you through the steps below. To adjust anything later, run /settings on a Halo page or open HaloUtils from your browser’s extensions menu.
2. Add the Halo hosts you use.Add your full Halo HTTPS host in the instance settings, including a custom domain if you use one. You can instead enter a domain suffix to cover every subdomain of that domain with one wildcard permission. Save and grant access when the browser asks. Give production, test, and development their own names and colors. You can also enable Sync color from Halo separately for each instance; it is off by default.
3. Open Halo and sign in.Open or reload a configured Halo tab. Use your normal Halo account; the extension works within its existing permissions.
4. Press / to find your next move.Open the command palette outside a text field. The update-set panel is available with Alt + Shift + H.

The first-run setup

The welcome page takes four short steps, and everything it saves can be changed later in Settings.

1. Add your instances. Type each host manually, import a HaloUtils configuration file, or enter the URL of a shared configuration that HaloUtils keeps up to date. You are asked for page access to the hosts you add.
2. Pick a theme. Follow your browser, or choose light or dark for Settings, the side panel, and the setup page.
3. Tune the command window. Choose whether a typed number such as /9385 searches tickets, users, and agents or opens the ticket, and whether commands open in a new tab or the current tab.
4. Try it. Press / on any Halo page, browse every command, or add a custom command of your own.

Settings has a search field to jump to any option, and an Import/Export section to move your configuration between browsers or follow a team’s shared file. See import, export & share.

Protecting unsaved changes

HaloUtils asks before you lose work in Halo editors and their dialogs, such as workflows, integration runbooks and their steps, ticket types, custom fields, and custom integrations and methods. Closing a dialog, navigating to another page, or using the browser’s back and forward buttons while an editor has unsaved changes shows Keep editing and Discard changes. Reloading or closing the tab uses your browser’s own confirmation. Read-only views are never treated as changed.

Saving a step does not save the workflow or runbook it belongs to, so the parent stays protected until you save it too. Integration methods save on their own. The protection is on by default; turn it off in Settings → Page Behavior → Unsaved changes → Confirm before discarding unsaved changes. See the privacy details for what it reads.

Staying up to date

Open Halo tabs keep working when HaloUtils is updated or reloaded, so you do not need to reload them, and settings you save apply to every open Halo tab, including tabs that were in the background. After an update, an optional one-time notice shows the releases you missed; the side panel’s What’s new button shows the full history. When upgrading from a version before 0.23.0, reload open Halo tabs once.

HaloUtils is not affiliated with or endorsed by Halo. It is an independent project built to make everyday work on Halo’s platforms better. Capture and replay capabilities depend on your Halo configuration, recorded data, and endpoint support.

02. A few shortcuts to start with

Turn numeric lookup off in Settings → Slash Command Window if you prefer /12345 to open a ticket directly, turn on Search accounts by Username only to match account names more narrowly, or turn on Open commands in the current tab if you prefer commands to replace the page you are on. Browse the complete command reference and custom configuration guide. Add custom commands and instance-switching commands in options. Instance commands preserve your current path, query, and hash; you choose their names. You can also export this configuration as JSON and, if your team hosts that file, let HaloUtils keep your commands and instances in sync with it while preserving your own changes — see the privacy details.

03. Record your first update set

Update Sets are experimental and disabled by default. Recording, deployment, rollback, and sync may behave unexpectedly. Use at your own risk and test the workflow in a test tenant first. Turning the feature off preserves existing local update-set data.

In HaloUtils, open Settings → Experimental Features → Update Sets, enable the switch, and save your settings. Then enable Config Change Tracking in your source tenant under Configuration → Advanced Settings. Sign in as a Halo agent, then interact with a Halo page so HaloUtils can observe an API session token.

1. Open the update-set workspace in Chromium’s side panel or Firefox’s sidebar and create an update set with a name and optional description.
2. Start recording and make tracked configuration changes. HaloUtils reads your agent’s commits within the recording window from Halo’s native change log.
3. Stop recording and review the captured operations in Update set → Changes. Search or filter the changes, inspect request and rollback data, and export the set if you need a local file.
4. Open the target Halo tenant and interact with it so its session is available. In Deploy, check that the intended tenant is active.
5. Select Check deployment, resolve blocking issues, then use Review and deploy to confirm the named set and target host. Changes to the set, target, mode, or plan require another check.
6. When needed, use Recovery → Preview rollback to review availability and affected steps before confirmation. Source rollback uses Halo’s recorded rollback data; replay targets use snapshots of their own state captured before replay. Activity retains deployment and rollback results.

Validate replay and rollback in a test tenant first. Some changes are capture-only or lack rollback data. A deployment check does not guarantee that every write will succeed. Halo changes outside native change tracking are not captured.

04. Server sync: coming later

Local features work without a sync account. The server-sync component is not publicly available yet and will follow at a later point.

When it is available, review the data-sharing details before enabling it.

05. Unsupported browsers

No version is available for Safari or other browser engines, including WebKit browsers on iOS. The install buttons display an unavailable message when one of these browsers is detected.

You can find the supported browser versions and their store listings in the installation options above.