Foxglove WebSocket server

⚠️ Important Notice: This package is no longer maintained and has been replaced by foxglove-sdk. We recommend migrating to the Foxglove SDK for future development.

This package provides a server implementation of the Foxglove WebSocket protocol with examples. The protocol enables Foxglove to ingest arbitrary “live” streamed data.

Example servers

This package includes example servers demonstrating how to use JSON and Protobuf data. To install additional dependencies required for the examples, run:

$ pip install 'foxglove-websocket[examples]'

Run a simple example server that publishes messages on a single example_msg topic:

• JSON server – Uses JSON to encode message data and JSON Schema to describe the message layout.

  python -m foxglove_websocket.examples.json_server
  

• Protobuf server – Uses Protobuf to encode message data.

  python -m foxglove_websocket.examples.protobuf_server
  

Note: You must exit each server (control + c) before starting up another.

To see data from any server, open Foxglove with a Foxglove WebSocket connection to ws://localhost:8765/:

To customize each server for your specifications, copy either server into a separate file like server.py and make the desired adjustments to this template. Start up your server from the command line, using python3 server.py.

Multi-threaded usage

The threaded_server example demonstrates how to use the FoxgloveServer class in a thread-safe way when interacting with a threaded middleware. Run the server using:

python -m foxglove_websocket.examples.threaded_server

When connected to the server in Foxglove, use the Data Source Info panel to see channels appearing and disappearing, and a Plot panel to visualize data on each channel.

For a more detailed explanation, read the example's source code.

Development

When developing or maintaining the foxglove-websocket package, it is recommended to use pipenv to manage development dependencies and virtualenv.

• pipenv install --dev – Create a virtualenv and install development dependencies
• pipenv shell – Enter the virtualenv