ROS installation tools

Using rosinstall you can update several folders using a variety of SCMs (SVN, Mercurial, git, Bazaar) with just one command.

That way you can more effectively manage source code workspaces.

The rosinstall package provides a Python API for interacting with a source code workspace as well as a group of command line tools. Rosinstall leverages the vcstools package for source control and stores its state in .rosinstall files.

rosinstall was developed to help with the ROS software, but it has no install dependencies to ROS. It offers support for ROS environments and thus makes some assumptions about ROS being present at runtime, but those can be easily removed and rosws provides all services even when there is no ROS installed. The vision is for the bulk of rosinstall to be a ROS agnostic tool one day.

Command Line Tools:

Installation

Ubuntu

On Ubuntu the recommended way to install rosinstall is to use apt. If the ros sources are added to your apt sources .

To set ROS sources see http://wiki.ros.org/fuerte/Installation/Sources

sudo apt-get install python-rosinstall

Other Platforms

On other platforms rosinstall is available on pypi and can be installed via pip

pip install -U rosinstall

or easy_install:

easy_install -U rosinstall vcstools

Linux and Bash users will benefit a lot from also installing bash completion. This is provided in a different package due to the installation process currently requiring linux. It is only available via pip for now:

pip install -U rosinstall_shellcompletion

Tutorials

Rosinstall File Format:

Advanced: rosinstall developers/contributors

Indices and tables