There are many reasons to add a service worker to Wordpress: for example you may want to improve caching or add web push notifications. Let's see how to do that.
Registering a service worker manually
This is probably the easiest approach:
function register_my_service_worker () {
echo "<script>navigator.serviceWorker.register('/service-worker.js')</script>";
}
add_action ( 'wp_head', 'register_my_service_worker' );
Then you can create the service worker in the root directory of Wordpress and add some contents to it.
Some plugins, like the Pushpad plugin, currently use this strategy.
This works great... unless multiple plugins or themes try to install a service worker: this will usually break the service worker registration and the plugins will not work as expected. The problem is that, unlike normal scripts, there can be only one service worker per scope (basically a website can only have one main service worker in the root directory).
Registering a service worker using plugins
Many developers, including Mozilla, have tried to provide a solution to the problem above. They have developed general plugins that register one service worker and allow other plugins to add contents to it programmatically.
That would work in theory, but in practice there are too many plugins that attempt to serve as a general solution for service workers and everyone uses a different strategy to register service workers. So this is not the right solution.
Registering a service worker using a hook from Wordpress core
The only solution is to have an official hook in the Wordpress core that allows plugins to add their code to the service worker.
This official hook is currently in development:
When the plugin is merged on master, you will be able to use a simple hook (e.g. wp_register_service_worker) to add contents to the Wordpress service worker. This will work even when multiple plugins need to use the service worker.