Panels

A panel is a self-contained, themed mini-app the Web Terminal shows as a tab beside the chat. OSPREY’s own tools — Channel Finder, ARIEL, the lattice dashboard, the artifact gallery — are all panels, and you can add your own. Because panels use the shared design tokens (Theming), they match your theme automatically, in light and dark, with no extra work.

Enable OSPREY’s built-in panels in config.yml:

web:
  panels:
    ariel: true
    channel-finder: true
    lattice: true

Panels backed by a URL

An entry under web.panels can also declare a URL-backed panel — a tab that shows another web service inside the terminal. This is how the EVENTS dashboard and the Bluesky PLAN / RESULTS tabs ship in the control-assistant preset (a build that includes those stacks registers the entries for you):

web:
  panels:
    events:
      label: EVENTS
      url: http://127.0.0.1:8020    # the backing service
      path: /dashboard              # optional: page the tab opens (default /)
      health_endpoint: /healthz     # optional: lets the hub report status

The hub shows the service as a tab and proxies requests to it from the same origin, so the browser never needs direct access to the backing port.

Adding your own panel

The easy path is the guided skill — a coding agent follows it to produce a panel that already meets every rule:

osprey skills install creating-an-osprey-panel

Once the panel is written and validated, drop its folder under your project’s panels/ directory and turn on discovery:

web:
  allow_runtime_panels: true    # off by default

On the next start, every valid panel under panels/ shows up as a tab. Invalid ones are skipped and logged, so one bad panel never breaks the others.

Warning

The Web Terminal has no application-level login. Turning on allow_runtime_panels serves whatever panels are on disk to anyone who can reach the port — right for the intended single-operator, local setup, but a facility that exposes the terminal more widely should put its own authentication in front of it.

Panel layouts (“presets”)

A layout is a named set of panels an operator applies in one click — “the machine-setup view is these four panels.” Define them under web.presets, where each key is the menu label and each value is the exact set of panels to show:

web:
  presets:
    "Machine setup": [channel-finder, lattice, artifacts, okf]
    "Logbook review": [ariel, artifacts]

Each layout appears under a Layouts section at the top of the panel + menu. Picking one is exclusive: its panels open and every other panel closes. Members must be enabled built-in panels or custom panels you have declared; an unknown id is dropped with a warning, and a layout with no valid members is skipped. When no web.presets are configured — the default — the + menu is unchanged, so layouts never add clutter to a deployment that has not opted in.

Layouts are just a shortcut over the ordinary show/hide of panels, so the OSPREY agent can achieve the same result with its show_panel / hide_panel tools; list_panels reports the configured layouts so the agent can honor a request like “set up for machine setup.”

Going deeper — how panels work

You only need this to write a panel by hand or wire a new one into the hub; the creating-an-osprey-panel skill and the source (which the panel validator and its browser test suite back) are the real reference. The rough idea:

Authoring rules

A panel is one HTML entry point plus a manifest.json (its id, label, entry file, and version). Two rules make it theme itself for free, and a validator enforces both: it must boot the shared theme before the page paints (so it never flashes the wrong colors), and it must use only design tokens for color — never a raw hex value. Copy OSPREY’s reference panel and you start compliant.

Serving & discovery

Discovered panels are served straight from disk, from the same origin as the terminal — no proxy. Discovery is fail-closed: only a fully valid panel is ever served. The allow_runtime_panels switch is deliberately off by default because it is also what lets the agent register panels at runtime — turning it on is your explicit decision to trust the panels the terminal makes available.

Embedding contract

The hub and its panels coordinate over a small shared contract — enough for a panel to pick up the current theme and to hide its own logo when embedded, so it sits flush inside the hub instead of showing two titles. The browser test suite is the exact, up-to-date spec; this is only the shape of it.

See also

Theming

The design tokens panels style against.

Run the Web Terminal

Running the terminal that hosts them.