Announcing Private Foxglove Studio Extensions for Your Organization

Share custom visualization tools with your teammates

Esther Weon ·

2 min read

Published August 4, 2022

Last year, we announced Foxglove Studio extensions – custom panels that you could build and install locally to explore your robotics data. With extensions, any Foxglove user is empowered to create bespoke visualization and debugging panels for their project-specific needs.

Today, we’re excited to simplify sharing extensions in a company setting. For customers on our Pro or Enterprise plans, you can now publish extensions and deploy them automatically across your organization.

Check out our docs to get started with building your own extension and sharing it with your team.

Foxglove has made it easy for us to share and visualize data across many teams at 6 River Systems. We’re excited to more easily distribute our custom extensions across the company.

Katy Powers, Localization and Mapping Lead at 6 River Systems

Foxglove Studio ships with a rich suite of data visualization and debugging tools, called panels, to help you explore your robot’s data. If Studio doesn’t have an out-of-the-box panel ready for your use case, you can write an extension with your company-specific needs. This still allows you to leverage Studio’s existing layout and data management features – from configuring settings, adding the extension as a panel to a layout, or connecting to a data source. With extensions, you can customize Foxglove Studio for your project – whether you’re working on a space satellite or developing an autonomous Formula One car.

Until now, you’ve had to choose between developing local extensions for yourself, or publishing your extension publicly for all Foxglove users. If you did want to share an extension privately, you had to upload it to Dropbox or Google Drive. Your teammate would then have to download the extension and install it themselves. If you made changes to your extension, you would need to repeat this process over again – for each teammate who wanted to use your latest changes.

With private team extensions, this collaboration process becomes much more streamlined - your entire organization can now access the latest version of your published extension. Instead of manually passing around extension files, you can simply use the foxglove CLI to publish the extension (from your desktop or CI), and it will be automatically installed for all users in your organization.

Building out robust collaboration support has been a key focus of our Studio roadmap – we announced team layouts, shared data via Data Platform, and now team extensions as milestones on this journey.

As we continue improving Studio to accompany your team to the bleeding edge of robotics, we’d love to hear your feedback. Join the conversation on our Slack or Twitter, or check out our GitHub to file feature requests.

Check out our documentation to get started building your own extension and sharing it with your team.