About

ros_web_gui is a package for visualizing the available ROS nodes, topics, parameters and service calls in a web browser. It provides much of the functionality that is also available with the ROS command line tools and rqt_graph, but with a graphical user interface. When running the ros_web_gui, a flask-based webserver will be started that can be accessed on port 5000.

Installation

First, you should install ros on your machine. It is heavily recommened to use Ubuntu 20.04 or higher as ros-noetic is the first version with support for python3.

After installing ROS, you can install ros_web_gui via pip:

pip install ros_web_gui

When using the package from Github, you need the python packages pygraphviz, pyyaml and flask. So you can set up a conda env or virtual environment with

conda install flask pydot pyyaml rosdep

OR

pip install flask pydot pyyaml rosdep

After this, you should be ready to use the ros_web_gui.

Running

When ros_web_gui was installed via pip, you can simply type ros_web_gui in the terminal. When you checked out the repository you can run scripts/run_flask.sh. Then, go to your browser and open http://localhost:5000.

For trying out ros_web_gui, you can also run the scripts/run_ros.sh script which will start a roscore together with a simple publisher and a subscriber for testing purposes.