Introducing the Posit Connect Gallery: Essential Extensions for Managing Long-Lived Content
If you’ve ever maintained data science projects in production, you know the challenges: Which apps matter most to your users? How do you catch issues before they impact your audience? When is it time to update that aging Python runtime? Posit Connect now helps you answer these questions through the new Connect Gallery, which provides you with a curated set of tools to help answer these questions.
In this blog post, we’ll go over some of the essential extensions in Connect Gallery that can help you ensure your published content is functioning properly, up to date, and providing value to your users.
What is the Connect Gallery?
The Connect Gallery (introduced in Posit Connect 2025.05.0) houses a selection of open-source applications, reports, and dashboards that can be browsed on your Connect server and installed directly with a single click. These ready-to-use tools are managed by Posit, and help publishers and administrators tackle common challenges when managing production deployments at scale.
You can browse the Gallery by clicking “Gallery” in Connect’s top navigation bar. Each item in the Gallery has its own requirements (which might include the Connect version, the Python or R version, or the Posit product tier). If your Connect server is compatible with the requirements, you can use the Add button to deploy the item, and it’ll appear as a piece of content.
Four essential extensions for production content
At posit::conf(2025), the Connect engineering team presented four Connect Gallery extensions specifically built to help you maintain content that stays deployed and running over extended periods.
All four extensions are open-source and available on GitHub. This means you can not only use them as-is but also customize them to fit your organization’s specific needs and workflows.
Here’s how each one helps to manage your work on Connect over time:
1. Usage Metrics Dashboard
What it does: Provides insights into how your work is being used, like how often items are viewed, when they’re accessed, and overall patterns of engagement across all your published content.
Why it matters: Understanding which dashboards, applications, and reports your users actually engage with is crucial for prioritization. The Usage Metrics Dashboard helps you identify your most valuable content, so you know where to focus maintenance efforts and which items might be candidates for retirement.
2. Content Health Monitor
What it does: Continuously checks whether specific pieces of content are reachable and functioning properly.
Why it matters: This extension is actually a report that can be set up to run on a regular schedule of your choosing. When it detects that content has become unreachable, it sends you an email alert so you can address the issue promptly.
3. Runtime Version Scanner
What it does: Shows you which published content is running on specific versions of R, Python, or Quarto, allowing you to filter down to only content on older versions.
Why it matters: As your software ecosystem evolves, you need visibility into which applications are running on outdated runtimes. This scanner helps you identify content that needs updating for security or compatibility reasons, or content that’s so old it might be safe to archive or delete.
4. Package Vulnerability Scanner
What it does: Identifies published content using packages with reported security vulnerabilities, pulling data directly from Posit Package Manager.
Why it matters: Security vulnerabilities in dependencies are a serious concern for production applications. The Package Vulnerability Scanner gives you proactive visibility into potential security risks in your deployed content, allowing you to patch vulnerabilities before they become problems.
Beyond the Core Four
The Connect Gallery isn’t limited to these maintenance and management tools. It also includes:
Publisher Command Center
An app to help publishers view and manage their deployed content more effectively. With this tool, you can view app metadata and deployment history for all the applications you’re collaborating on, as well as see and manage running processes for individual apps—all from a single interface.
Chat with Content App
This extension provides a way to interact with and query your static content (such as Quarto or R Markdown documents) using a chat interface powered by a Large Language Model (LLM). Instead of manually searching through documents or reports, you can ask questions and get answers directly from your published content.
MCP Protocol examples
For those interested in exploring the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the gallery includes two complementary examples:
- Simple MCP Server: A straightforward example of a Connect extension that serves tools via the MCP protocol
- Simple Shiny Chat with MCP Support: A Shiny chat application demonstrating how to use the MCP client to facilitate remote tool calls
These examples are designed to work together, showing how MCP can enable interactive AI-powered applications on Posit Connect.
Get started with Connect Gallery
The Connect Gallery is available now within Posit Connect, making it easy to try out these tools and incorporate them into your workflow. Whether you’re managing a handful of applications or hundreds of pieces of content, these tools provide the visibility needed to keep everything running smoothly.
Ready to explore the Connect Gallery? Check out your Posit Connect instance to see these extensions in action, or visit the GitHub repository to review the code, customize them for your needs, or submit feedback and feature requests.
Ready to see Connect in action?
Posit Connect is a publishing platform that makes the delivery of data science content fast, approachable, and secure, supporting popular Python and R frameworks like Shiny, Dash, Gradio, Streamlit, Quarto, and more. Check out the Connect Get Started Guide here. If you’re new to Connect or want to explore how it can benefit your organization, schedule a personalized demo with our team.
