foxglove_bridge

[!IMPORTANT] This upcoming version of foxglove_bridge is built using the Foxglove SDK and is in public beta. There may be some remaining bugs or unexpected behavior. We encourage users to take it for a spin and submit feedback and bug reports.

Older versions of foxglove_bridge, including those targeting ROS 1, still are available from the foxglove/ros-foxglove-bridge repository or via the ROS package index for your ROS distro.

High performance ROS 2 WebSocket bridge using the Foxglove SDK, written in C++.

Motivation

Live debugging of ROS systems has traditionally relied on running ROS tooling such as rviz. This requires either a GUI and connected peripherals on the robot, or replicating the same ROS environment on a network-connected development machine including the same version of ROS, all custom message definitions, etc. To overcome this limitation and allow remote debugging from web tooling or non-ROS systems, rosbridge was developed. However, rosbridge suffers from performance problems with high frequency topics and/or large messages, and the protocol does not support full visibility into ROS systems such as interacting with parameters or seeing the full graph of publishers and subscribers.

The foxglove_bridge uses the Foxglove SDK (this repo!), a similar protocol to rosbridge but with the ability to support additional schema formats such as ROS 2 .msg and ROS 2 .idl, parameters, graph introspection, and non-ROS systems. The bridge is written in C++ and designed for high performance with low overhead to minimize the impact to your robot stack.

Build and install

Install using Docker

Docker images are built and published to our public Docker image registry for your convenience.

[!NOTE] We currently only provide Docker builds targeted to the linux/amd64 platform.

Images can be pulled with

docker pull us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/foxglove-images/images/foxglove_bridge:<tag>

where <tag> takes the form of:

ros-<ROS distro>-<foxglove SDK version>

For example, if you wanted to pull an image based on ROS Kilted and Foxglove SDK v0.11.0:

docker pull us-central1-docker.pkg.dev/foxglove-images/images/foxglove_bridge:ros-kilted-v0.11.0

Build from source

Getting the sources

Clone this repo from GitHub and cd to the local ROS workspace:

git clone https://github.com/foxglove/foxglove-sdk
cd foxglove-sdk/ros

All commands in this README hereafter assume you’re in the /ros subdirectory relative to the repository’s root.

Build using your ROS environment

Make sure you have ROS installed and your setup files are sourced. Then build:

make

Build using Docker

You can also build the bridge using a ROS environment within a Docker container:

# You can also append your preferred ROS 2 distro codename (e.g. make docker-build-jazzy). If omitted, ROS 'rolling' is used.
make docker-build

The built ROS workspace will be written to /ros in your foxglove_sdk directory.

Running the bridge

To run the bridge node, it is recommended to use the provided launch file.

If foxglove_bridge was built outside your ROS workspace, you need to source the local setup files so ROS 2 can find it:

source install/local_setup.bash

Once ROS is aware of the foxglove_bridge package, you can launch the bridge process:

ros2 launch foxglove_bridge foxglove_bridge_launch.xml port:=8765

You can also add foxglove_bridge to an existing launch file:

```xml

Changelog for package foxglove_bridge

3.2.1 (2025-09-26)

• Fix memory leak in generic_client allocate_message (#667)
• Contributors: Chris Lalancette, Matthew Harrison

3.2.0 (2025-09-22)

• Rewrite of foxglove_bridge to use the Foxglove SDK (various)
• fix errors on bridge shutdown (#640)
• Contributors: Eric Lujan, Hans-Joachim Krauch

0.8.5 (2025-05-15)

• fix rolling/kilted builds due to resource_retriever API changes (#351)
• avoid requesting parameters from unresponsive nodes (#345)
• Update default [asset_uri_allowlist]{.title-ref} parameter to allow dashes (#347)
• reorganize devcontainer dockerfile (#350)
• Use RCLCPP_VERSION_GTE from rclcpp/version.h in generic_client.cpp (#344)
• Fixed logging typo (#343)
• Contributors: Hans-Joachim Krauch, Meet Gandhi, johannesschrimpf

0.8.4 (2025-02-21)

• also advertise channels for ROS1 topics without publishers (#341)
• Contributors: Hans-Joachim Krauch

0.8.3 (2025-02-03)

• add best_effort_qos_topic_whitelist param (#329)
• Add missing functional include in message_definition_cache.cpp (#334)
• Contributors: David Revay, Silvio Traversaro

0.8.2 (2024-12-1)

• Fix "no matching function" error on yocto kirkstone (#331)
• Contributors: Graham Harison

0.8.1 (2024-11-26)

• Improve Error Reporting and Reduce Log Redundancy (#327)
• Contributors: Robin Dumas

0.8.0 (2024-07-31)

• Fix usage of deprecated AsyncParametersClient constructor (#319)
• Add ROS2 JSON publishing support (#307)
• Contributors: Davide Faconti, Hans-Joachim Krauch

0.7.10 (2024-07-12)

• Make ROS1 service type retrieval more robust (#316)
• Contributors: Hans-Joachim Krauch

0.7.9 (2024-07-05)

• Fix parsing of IDL message definitions (#313)
• Support publishing client message as loaned message (#314)
• fix: remove extra ";" in websocket_server.hpp (#311)
• Fix rolling smoke tests crashing (#309)
• Contributors: Andrey Milko, Hans-Joachim Krauch

0.7.8 (2024-06-11)

• Fix srv definition parsing failing due to carriage return (#303)
• Contributors: Hans-Joachim Krauch

0.7.7 (2024-05-21)

• send service call failure operation (#298)
• Fix service definition parsing on ROS rolling (#293)
• Update docs to discourage users from using websocket compression (#297)
• Update README.md to remove '$ ' so that you can copy and run command

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