This tool is not another password manager; it’s a tool for better development for the community, it can easily make your work easier and save you from a lot of anxiety of filling up the same forms again and again in development, testing or production environment. It’s a modern approach to better and productive in filling up forms and sharing them with your team.
How to Install Fill.ly
Google Chrome is the most popular browser right now. You can easily install Fill.ly as a chrome extension in the Chrome Web Store and it's completely free.
Note: extension is only available for Chrome
- Install the Fill.ly extension for chrome, It’s completely free.
- After Installation, you can notice a small Fill.ly icon on the right top bar of Chrome.
Now you can start saving forms. There are two ways in which you can save forms
HotKeys
It’s the easiest and most efficient way to save forms, just press ALT + Shift + 2 to save a form on a website, and to see all of your saved form for the website just press ALT + Shift + 1
You can also perform these actions through the icon of Fill.ly on the right top bar on Chrome, like this :
It’s just the most basic use of Fill.ly, but Fill.ly is power-packed with so many features. You can access all of these features from their Online Dashboard(Web UI), you can access the dashboard by signing up on Fill.ly’s official website..
How to Use Fill.ly
This is a very simple practical example of a Checkout Form, it’s on my computer right now, and I’m running it on a Localhost.
Scenario: It’s a checkout form, and the problem is that MySQL database is not getting the Credit Card Number, from the form correctly. So I want to fix it out but every time I have to Hard-Refresh the page, which means filling up the entire form again and again.
I have to fill up my form the very first time and then save the form using the FIll.ly Hotkey ALT + SHIFT + 2:
Then after a hard refresh, I don’t have to fill-up the form again, I can easily retrieve the saved form, with the Fill.ly HotKey ALT + SHIFT + 1:
So now you can imagine how easy it is to save and reuse forms with Fill.ly. This is not just for personal use, the frustrating experience is to work on Forms with Team. you have to explain every other guy to fill-up the form correctly. Now you can share your saved forms with anyone in your team and they can share their forms with you.
How to share forms with Teams?
You can share your saved forms with your team, in the UI dashboard of Fill.ly by visiting this link, you’ve to login first if you already have an account or you can Sign-up for Free on FIll.ly.
- I invited my friend to join my team at FIll.ly from the UI dashboard of Fill.ly,
- My friend received the automated email invite from Fill.ly and confirmed it. He is on my team now.
Bonus: Domain Mapping
What's Domain Mapping?
Domain mapping is using the saved forms on different instances of an app. For example, I’m using the fill.ly forms with the app in my local development environment, and then I uploaded the app to Netlify, this doesn’t mean that I can’t access the fill.ly forms. I can access them by mapping the local development environment’s domain to my netlify domain like this.
- Visit the Domain Mappings in Settings of Fill.ly
- Add a new mapping, Enter the domains and done.
- Now I can access all of my saved forms on My Netlify website.
Note: You have to enter the domain in the specified format: Without any prefix, Port, protocol, hashes, query strings (Just raw domain like myapp.com)
Summary
- You can easily save any form data on the web and refill it again later in just a second using Fill.ly extension for chrome, It will be always available to you.
- You can share any form details with your Team, and it’s much better than explaining them to fill this up with this, and then this. You can just tell them to use this form’s data and the filly will fill up the data in just a second for your team member.
- You don’t have to fill-up the form again for different app instances, you can easily map your domains to share the forms.
- It’s completely free, You can download it easily from Chrome Web Store.