Firefox extension frustration on a Mac

I was attempting to develop a simple firefox extension by following several online guides. More than one mentioned how to create a 'redirect' file in your profiles/extension directory.

None of these guides worked but I found a simple fix that I'd like to share with you.

Example (found on the interwebs):

First, we need to tell Firefox about your extension. During the development phase for Firefox versions 2.0 and higher, you can point Firefox to the folder where you are developing the extension, and it'll load it up every time you restart Firefox.

   1. Locate your profile folder and beneath it the profile you want to work with (e.g. Firefox/Profiles/<profile_id>.default/).

   2. Open the extensions/ folder, creating it if need be.

   3. Create a new text file and put the path to your development folder inside (e.g. C:\extensions\my_extension\ or ~/extensions/my_extension/). Windows users should retain the OS' slash direction, and everyone should remember to include a closing slash and remove any trailing spaces.

   4. Save the file with the id of your extension as its name (e.g. sample [at] example [dot] net). No file extension.

However, this did not appear to work on the mac. As just a random guess, I decided to try a symlink instead of the redirect file (perhaps they need redirect files on Windows because Windows doesn't support symlinks, AFAIK)

This did the trick:

$ pwd
/Users/cliff/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/pfx5ajr1.default/extensions
$ ln -s ~/Projects/[Your Module]/development/ [Your Module ID]