How to setup Intelisense on VS Code for ROS C++

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This works for me:

1. In .vscode folder and in c_cpp_properties.json file add "/opt/ros/distribution_name/include" in includePath, including quotes. Change "distribution_name" to your ROS distribution.
2. Restart vs code.

The ROS extension mentioned in wiki/IDEs includes a task to update the c_cpp_properties.json (adding ROS paths to includePath), but in my experience that feature is brittle.

It is much more robust to let catkin handle that by getting CMake to export compile_commands.json during the build process. Then you can point C++ IntelliSense to that compile_commands.json as an alternative to modifying the includePath. VSCode reference

More details (copied from my here):

This blog post by Erdal gives nice step-by-step instructions.

I had to make one change, though: Instead of creating the new catkin_make task, I used the default catkin: make task that the VSCode ROS extension automatically creates.

For IntelliSense to work, CMake in the catkin: make task needs to be configured to generate compile_commands.json, as the blog mentions. But the catkin: make task command cannot be edited. However, it simply runs catkin build (or catkin_make, whichever command you normally use to build ROS workspaces) under the hood. So I pre-configure catkin for my ROS workspace like so:

bash $ cd catkin_ws $ catkin config -a --cmake-args -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=1

Note that I use catkin-tools, not the simple catkin that ships with ROS.

The above command caches the CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS CMake argument in the catkin configuration. As mentioned in the blog, this CMake argument causes it to create compile_commands.json in catkin_ws/build/<package_name>/. If you point IntelliSense to this file using the compileCommands field in c_cpp_properties.json as mentioned in the blog, everything works.