Installing and Configuring Your ROS Environment
Description: This tutorials walks you through installing ROS and setting up your ROS environment on your computer.Tutorial Level: BEGINNER
Next Tutorial: Navigating the ROS Filesystem
Install ROS
Before starting these tutorials please complete installation as described in the ROS installation instructions.
Note that your installation of ROS is likely write-protected; in any case, it is unwise to modify the base installation without specific reasons. Instead you should create a new path in your home directory and prepend it to your ROS_PACKAGE_PATH as outlined below, and create additional packages in there. Prepending a path to ROS_PACKAGE_PATH causes all rosbash functions, such as roscd, to search through that path before moving on to the later paths, searching the default installation last. If you have trouble, it is useful to look at the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH documentation.
Create a ROS Workspace
For the following ROS tutorials you will need an area for working on tutorials and creating new ROS stacks and packages. Start by creating a ros_workspace directory where you prefer, in this tutorial we will create the ros_workspace in the home directory.
mkdir ~/ros_workspace
It's convenient to set up the ROS workspace automatically every time a new shell is launched:
echo "export ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=~/ros_workspace:$ROS_PACKAGE_PATH" >> ~/.bashrc echo "export ROS_WORKSPACE=~/ros_workspace" >> ~/.bashrc . ~/.bashrc
Confirmation
To confirm that your package path has been set, echo the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH variable.
echo $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH
You should see something similar to:
/home/user/ros_workspace:/opt/ros/fuerte/share:/opt/ros/fuerte/stacks
Now that your environment is setup, continue with the ROS file system tutorial.