Use the extensions API to build panels customized to your project
While our team’s North Star is to provide a suite of general-purpose tools for visualizing and debugging robotics data, we know many users have domain-specific needs that our out-of-the-box offering does not address.
At Foxglove, we believe in focusing on the tools that most of our users find useful, but we want the best of both worlds. We want to provide features applicable to most roboticists, but also empower you to develop bespoke tools customized to your specific needs, while leveraging Foxglove's existing data and layout management features.
That’s why we’re very excited to announce the alpha release of Foxglove extensions. We developed an SDK to help you easily build and install your own custom panels in Foxglove. Instead of creating your own tool or shoehorning yet another app into your workflow to accomplish some task, you can rely on Foxglove to be a one-stop shop for investigating your robotics data. With extensions, there is no limit to how uniquely tailored your Foxglove environment can be to your project.
We’ve also opened up the first version of our extension registry, where you can publish your Foxglove extension or search for and install other users’ contributions. With this registry, we hope to take a page from the open source community’s handbook and help the robotics world become that much smaller and more collaborative.
Building flexible and extensible software is a central tenet of our development philosophy. Our users should be able to adapt Foxglove to their use cases, without being limited by our roadmap priorities or blocked by our finite development resources. With the new Foxglove extensions API and registry, we hope to facilitate more collaboration and empower you to do more. But we’re not stopping just yet!
We already have a few ideas in the works for improving our extensions library, such as allowing custom panels to publish messages and supporting more “genres” of extensions including custom data formats and message decoders.
As we brainstorm new ways for Foxglove to accompany you to the bleeding edge of robotics, we’d love to hear your feedback to inform future development of this extensions feature. Our extension API remains experimental in this alpha release, so feel free to let us know what improvements or new features you'd like to see!
Join the conversation on our Discord or Twitter. You can also get involved in discussions.
Read our docs for a step-by-step tutorial on how to get started on your first Foxglove extension. Happy hacking!
