Hassle-free Ros2 Setup

Disclaimer: “This is not an official ROS2 distribution. This is a file that installs from the official ROS2 repositories. The owner of this project, platform, or service shall not be held liable for any loss, damage, or corruption of data, whether caused by system failures, user errors, or any other unforeseen circumstances. By using this service, the user acknowledges and agrees that they are solely responsible for backing up and protecting their data. The owner makes no representations or warranties regarding the security, accuracy, or completeness of any data stored or processed through the service.”

Installing Ros2

This script is designed to save time by automating the process of copying content from the official page and identifying potential errors. It’s an interactive script that automatically detects your operating system and presents a list of compatible ROS2 distributions for you to choose from. The script will also guide you through sourcing the required paths and offer to create a basic workspace at your desired location to help you get started.

Please note that ROS2 versions are specific to Ubuntu versions. For example, ROS2 Humble is only supported on Ubuntu Jammy and its derivatives. If the script is unable to detect a supported operating system, you may manually override the auto-selection of the ROS2 distribution. However, proceed with caution and be aware of the risks involved.

To install ros2 ,run the following in a terminal and enter the details as prompted

Pro tip : Read the next section before proceeding and at-least ask the chatgpt what the script does before running a random script from internet.

   curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mohammedrashithkp/ros2-installer/stable/ros2-installer.sh | bash

What Happens under the hood

Here the UBUNTU_CODENAME is used from /etc/os-releases to detect the ubuntu-codename such as jammy,noble etc as the ros packages are specific to each.After detecting ,it will show the names of the available ros2 distro (humble,jazzy etc) and prompts the user to enter the distro they wish to install.

It proceeds to install the dependencies and ros2-disro in the Desktop form, which contains all the necessary things to get started.The setting up of locale and ros2-distro-desktop takes some time so kindly be patient .

Now we proceed to workspace creation which works like virtual environments in Python .You can treat it as a folder with all the necessary files to run ros2 packages.By sourcing the workspace we are able to run ros2 nodes from anywhere in the system.The script will prompt the user for a name and the path where you want to set it up ,the default is ros2_ws and your desktop .

Later we create workspace_folder/src to store all the ros2 packages and initialise the workspace .Now you end up with a proper workspace with src ,build ,install folders .

And as a final step , you are prompted whether you need to add the commands for sourcing in the ~/.bashrc .Adding it will allow you to run the packages installed in the ros2 workspace from anywhere in your system .Denying it means that you have to run source /path/to/workspace/install/setup.bash before accessing ros2 packages to tell the system where to look for the files.

Now you can clone your desired ros2 projects into your src folder and run colcon build at workspace folder level or you can create new package by following the official documentation

Kindly star the repo if it helped you save time and have a nice day!!