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The ROS source is distributed across many repositories; there is no central tarball that contains all of ROS.

The basic steps for installing ROS are:

  • Install the rosdep utility, which is used to resolve ROS dependencies to native packages. This usually comes from pip on non-Ubuntu platforms.
  • Install the rosinstall_generator, wstool and rosinstall utilities, which are used to set up ROS workspaces and download the sources for the various ROS packages. These usually come from pip on non-Ubuntu platforms.
  • Invoke rosinstall_generator to generate the list of packages to be downloaded.
  • Invoke wstool to download and unpack the package sources.
  • Invoke rosdep to resolve and install system dependencies
  • Invoke catkin to do the build and installation process.

If you're doing the build for a HPC cluster, you'll either want to do the final installation to a shared filesystem (NFS etc) or distribute the resulting installation directory to all of the machines in your cluster.

I believe there are options for rosdep that allow you to query all of the system dependencies for the ROS packages that you're installing; you should be able to use this output to construct a script that installs all of the dependencies on each of your machines.