This action sets up a ROS and ROS 2 environment for use in actions.

1. Overview
2. Supported platforms
3. Tasks performed by the action
4. Usage
   1. Setting up the worker, and installing the system dependencies
   2. Setting up the worker, and installing system dependencies on all OSes
   3. Setting up the worker, installing system dependencies and ROS (Linux)
   4. Use pre-release ROS 2 binaries for testing
   5. Including RTI Connext
   6. Iterating on all ROS distributions, for all platforms
5. Alternative to setup-ros
6. Developing
7. License

setup-ros sets up an environment so that:

• ROS 2 latest development branch builds from source,
• non-EOL (End Of Life) distribution of ROS 2 builds from source,
• any ROS, and ROS 2 package depending on non-EOL distribution builds from source

The action will not install ROS, or ROS 2, by default. To install a ROS binary distribution, pass a value to required-ros-distributions (see example below).

⚠️ apt-get update is flaky on bare metal GitHub actions Linux workers relying on the GitHub APT mirrors. It is recommended to run setup-ros in a Docker container. See jobs.<job_id>.container documentation. An alternative approach is to edit APT sources on the bare metal worker (see #80 for details).

This GitHub action aims for strict REP-3 and REP-2000 compliance. setup-ros supports all non-EOL ROS distributions, on all Tier-1 platforms. In particular, this action supports Ubuntu, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.

For macOS, and Microsoft Windows, the OS version specified in the REPs may not be available as a GitHub Hosted runners. In this case, this GitHub action CI runs the closest available worker environment.

Users requiring exact REP compliance should run the action on a self-hosted runner.

This problem does not apply to Linux workers, where Docker can ensure that the action runs the Linux distribution specified by the REPs.

setup-ros installs the following command-line tools:

• colcon
• rosdep
• vcs

It also performs the following actions:

• On Ubuntu:
  • Setting the locale to en_US.UTF-8 and, the timezone to UTC
  • GCC and clang default APT packages
  • Registering the Open Robotics APT repository
  • Installing ROS and ROS 2 system dependencies using APT
• On macOS:
  • Installing ROS and ROS 2 system dependencies using Homebrew and pip
• On Microsoft Windows:
  • Installing ROS and ROS 2 system dependencies using Chocolatey

The dependencies installed by this package include ROS 2 DDS vendor packages, such as Eclipse Cyclone DDS, eProsima Fast DDS, and RTI Connext DDS. See src/package_manager/*.ts for the complete list.

See action.yml.

setup-ros is under active development, and compatibility between releases is not yet guaranteed. Please do not use ros-tooling/setup-ros@main. Instead, pin your workflows to a particular release, e.g.: ros-tooling/[email protected].

The default behavior is to only install development tools. No ROS binary distribution is installed in this case. This setup should be used when ROS is built entirely from source.

steps:
  - uses: ros-tooling/[email protected]
  - run: vcs --help

It is possible to iterate on macOS and Windows from the same job (build). Ubuntu requires its own separate workflow as additional configuration is required for Docker.

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }}
    strategy:
      fail-fast: false
      matrix:
        os: [macOS-latest, windows-latest]
    steps:
      - name: Setup ROS
        uses: ros-tooling/[email protected]
      - run: vcs --help

  build_docker:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    container:
      image: ubuntu:noble
    steps:
      - name: Setup ROS
        uses: ros-tooling/[email protected]
      - run: vcs --help

One or more ROS distributions can be installed simultaneously by passing multiple values to required-ros-distributions.

build_docker:
  runs-on: ubuntu-latest
  container:
    image: ubuntu:noble
  steps:
    - uses: ros-tooling/[email protected]
      with:
        required-ros-distributions: jazzy rolling
    - run: "source /opt/ros/jazzy/setup.bash && ros2 run --help"
    - run: "source /opt/ros/rolling/setup.bash && ros2 run --help"

Note: on Ubuntu, required-ros-distributions installs the desktop variant for that distribution. This option is not required, and should probably be avoided in most workflows. It is retained for historical reasons and those who specifically do not care about whether their application specifies its dependencies properly.

You can specify if you'd like to use the pre-release ROS 2 repository in your sources list file by setting the use-ros2-testing parameter to true.

build_docker:
  runs-on: ubuntu-latest
  container:
    image: ubuntu:noble
  steps:
    - uses: ros-tooling/[email protected]
      with:
        use-ros2-testing: true
        required-ros-distributions: jazzy

By default this action will not install RTI Connext as it requires acceptance of a non-commerical license. The license agreement should be reviewed by users on their own before accepting it. To include RTI Connext, simply set the install-connext parameter to true.

build_docker:
  runs-on: ubuntu-latest
  container:
    image: ubuntu:noble
  steps:
    - uses: ros-tooling/[email protected]
      with:
        install-connext: true
        use-ros2-testing: true
        required-ros-distributions: jazzy

This workflow illustrates how to spawn one job per ROS release, for every supported platform.

The workflow test is iterating on all ROS 2 distributions, on macOS, and Windows.

The workflow test_docker is iterating on all ROS and ROS 2 distributions, for all supported Ubuntu distributions, using Docker. The test matrix associates each distribution with one Docker image. This is required to ensure that the appropriate Ubuntu container is used. For example, Noetic requires focal, Humble requires jammy, Jazzy requires noble, etc.

jobs:
  test: # Docker is not supported on macOS and Windows.
    runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }}
    strategy:
      matrix:
        os: [macOS-latest, windows-latest]
        ros_distribution: # Only include ROS 2 distributions, as ROS 1 does not support macOS and Windows.
          - humble
          - iron
    steps:
      - uses: ros-tooling/[email protected]
        with:
          required-ros-distributions: ${{ matrix.ros_distribution }}
      - name: build and test
        uses: ros-tooling/[email protected]
        with:
          package-name: YOUR_PACKAGE_HERE MORE_PACKAGES_HERE
          target-ros2-distro: ${{ matrix.ros_distribution }}

  test_docker: # On Linux, iterates on all ROS 1 and ROS 2 distributions.
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    strategy:
      matrix:
        ros_distribution:
          - noetic
          - humble
          - iron
          - jazzy
          - rolling

        # Define the Docker image(s) associated with each ROS distribution.
        # The include syntax allows additional variables to be defined, like
        # docker_image in this case. See documentation:
        # https://help.github.com/en/actions/reference/workflow-syntax-for-github-actions#example-including-configurations-in-a-matrix-build
        #
        # Platforms are defined in REP 3 and REP 2000:
        # https://ros.org/reps/rep-0003.html
        # https://ros.org/reps/rep-2000.html
        include:
          # Noetic Ninjemys (May 2020 - May 2025)
          - docker_image: ubuntu:focal
            ros_distribution: noetic
            ros_version: 1

          # Humble Hawksbill (May 2022 - May 2027)
          - docker_image: ubuntu:jammy
            ros_distribution: humble
            ros_version: 2

          # Iron Irwini (May 2023 - November 2024)
          - docker_image: ubuntu:jammy
            ros_distribution: iron
            ros_version: 2

          # Jazzy Jalisco (May 2024 - May 2029)
          - docker_image: ubuntu:noble
            ros_distribution: jazzy
            ros_version: 2

          # Rolling Ridley (No End-Of-Life)
          - docker_image: ubuntu:noble
            ros_distribution: rolling
            ros_version: 2
    container:
      image: ${{ matrix.docker_image }}
    steps:
      - name: setup ROS environment
        uses: ros-tooling/[email protected]
        with:
          required-ros-distributions: ${{ matrix.ros_distribution }}
      - name: build and test ROS 1
        if: ${{ matrix.ros_version == 1 }}
        uses: ros-tooling/[email protected]
        with:
          package-name: YOUR_PACKAGE_HERE MORE_PACKAGES_HERE
          target-ros1-distro: ${{ matrix.ros_distribution }}
      - name: build and test ROS 2
        if: ${{ matrix.ros_version == 2 }}
        uses: ros-tooling/[email protected]
        with:
          package-name: YOUR_PACKAGE_HERE MORE_PACKAGES_HERE
          target-ros2-distro: ${{ matrix.ros_distribution }}

On Linux workers, an alternative to setup-ros is to run actions on a Docker container where ROS is pre-installed. See Open Robotics DockerHub page, for instance.

For developing and releasing setup-ros, see DEVELOPING.md.

The scripts and documentation in this project are released under the Apache 2 license.