No explanation of how to run

[Hodapp87]

Early on it says, "Webviz is a web-based application for playback and visualization of ROS bag files." and links you to a Webviz demo, however, I cannot find any explanation of how to actually serve this web application myself and get to it from my browser.

After a bit of messing around it looks like the proper way is running npm run docs and then browsing to http://localhost:8080/try (just http://localhost:8080 doesn't really work, since the 'view demo' links aren't relative but are to webviz.io) - but this is mostly from guesswork on my part, and it's not at all apparent.

[janpaul123]

Yeah, documentation for development is super lacking at this point. I at least added a bit more info for how to run in #160. But if you want to just use the tool itself with your ROS bags (and don't care about development) you can just use https://webviz.io/try/ and drag in your bags.

[asimay]

hi, @janpaul123 , I did as you said, I dragged the bagfile into webviz, but why the camera image cannot show out? I checked the message type is right. is this caused by network issue? we know the images are too large.

[asimay]

and we don't have internet on host-machine, it is setup on car, so how to deploy your tools on our server?

[jtbandes]

Hi @asimay,

• For your camera image — the Image panel currently doesn't support the mono8 encoding. The supported sensor_msgs/Image encodings are here (note that we also allow sensor_msgs/CompressedImage):

  webviz/packages/webviz-core/src/panels/ImageView/ImageCanvas.js

  Lines 88 to 91 in 9be1ffe

  	case "yuv422": decodeYUV(rawData, width, height, image.data); break;
  	case "bgr8": decodeBGR(rawData, width, height, image.data); break;
  	case "32FC1": decodeFloat1c(rawData, width, height, image.data); break;
  	case "bayer_rggb8": decodeRGGB(rawData, width, height, image.data); break;

  (And we're going to add the other bayer_*8 variants very soon.) If you're interested in contributing to Webviz, we would welcome a PR to add support for mono8! Otherwise, we'll take note of this feature request, and we can definitely add a better error message in the Image panel so the problem is more obvious 😉

• For deploying Webviz, currently the best option is npm run build as documented in the readme. That will compile the package with webpack, so it can be run with node. It would be possible to, for example, create a Node.js Docker image that runs the server. Alternatively, the JS bundle could be loaded from a static HTML page, served with any simple web server. (That's exactly what this index.html file is, which is used for https://webviz.io/try. The webpack dev server is configured to serve it here.) Feel free to file a new issue if you get stuck with this.

[jtbandes]

@asimay mono8 and mono16 encodings are supported now as of #174. Give it a try!

Going to close this issue now as we've updated the documentation a little bit and provided some more deployment info. Feel free to open a new issue if you have a specific question or problem with getting it to run.