Robenv - Lightweight ROS System Installation Tool

Welcome to Robenv, a lightweight Command-Line Interface (CLI) tool designed to simplify the installation and management of ROS (Robot Operating System) systems. With Robenv, you can effortlessly create and install ROS systems in a virtual environment without requiring root privileges or relying on git submodules. This tool empowers you to easily package and deploy ROS systems, enhancing portability and enabling hassle-free development.

By encapsulating the ROS system within a virtual environment, Robenv isolates the dependencies, ensuring that the installation remains self-contained. This approach eliminates conflicts with existing ROS installations or other system packages, enabling you to experiment with different ROS configurations or work on multiple projects simultaneously without interference.

Robenv streamlines the process of setting up and managing ROS systems, making it an ideal tool for researchers, roboticists, and ROS enthusiasts. Whether you are exploring new algorithms, developing robotics applications, or working on collaborative projects, Robenv provides a seamless environment for installing and managing ROS systems.

Dependencies

• fakeroot
• debhelper
• dh-python

Installation

At this moment there is no simple installation command yet. Please follow the [Developer Setup](Developer Setup).

Usage

Running robenv without any arguments will print helpful usage documentation.

Before running any command you have to initialize the virtual environment via

robenv init

Initializing the virtual environment requires a local installation of ROS. For more information see robenv help init.

Autocompletion

We ship with a basic autocompletion setup that you can easily enable yourself. Take a look at robenv help completions for support on how to enable completion for your specific shell.

Developer Setup

Install poetry and install by running

poetry install

This will create a virtual environment for this project. poetry shell will spawn a shell within the virtual environment. The poetry documentation will provide more information about using the virtual environment.

System-Site packages

When developing for ROS2 we probably need additional system dependencies as ROS2 apparently changed their internal handling of python-dependencies.

Potential errors that signify this are:

• Missing lark dependency
• Missing numpy dependency (esp. in connection with rosidl)

To fix this we need to enable an additional option in poetry so that we can use those.

Two points to mention:

• Existing poetry envs will not change, so you need to recreate them
• This is a system-level change, so maybe only do that in containers or whereever you are fine with that constraint

poetry config virtualenvs.options.system-site-packages true

After that recreate your venv via:

rm -rf $(poetry env info --path) && poetry install

Terminology

General

• ROS package --> already defined in ROS space (the thing that has a package.xml)
• ROS Debian package --> the packed artifacts of a ROS package in .deb format
• ROS workspace --> a standard ROS workspace (the thing that contains the src folder including multiple packages and can be compiled with catkin)
• repository --> GIT repo
• robenv --> Our own virtual env for ROS (default path robenv)
• virtualenv --> Python virtual env (venv)

Dependencies

The following terms are not mutually exclusive (except when they are). E.g. there could be an internal ROS dependency, but no internal generic ROS dependency.

• Generic dependency --> Dependency that is not a ROS package
• ROS dependency --> Dependency that is a ROS package
• Internal dependency --> ROS dependency that can be resolved inside the ROS workspace
• External dependency --> Dependency that cannot be resolved inside the ROS workspace
• build dependency
• runtime dependency

License

The project is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license - see the LICENSE file for details.

The integration tests contain ROS workspaces with packages adopted from the ROS 1 and 2 wiki. They are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 and 4.0 respectively. The licenses are specified in the package.xml files.

FAQ

I did override ROS_HOME because $reason but robenv breaks this

Document #52 results

Why is robenv a non-hidden folder? Shouldn't .robenv be more in line with python venvs?

Yes it should be and yes it would be.

Sadly it then would prevent autocompletion in most of the ros commands on the file-level. rosbash filters everything from the completion results that is in some hidden directory. Interestingly this only applies to files and not to projects.

The reason for this is described also in:

ros/ros#295