foxglove-websocket

Foxglove WebSocket server

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

Installation

$ pip install foxglove-websocket

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 Studio 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 Studio, 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