This code is in active development and should not be considered stable.

This package is a plugin to colcon-core. It provides functionality to bundle a built workspace. A bundle is a portable environment which can be moved to a different linux system and executed as if the contents of the bundle was installed locally.

Currently, ROS Kinetic is supported by installing the colcon-ros-bundle package.

To use colcon-bundle after building your workspace execute:

colcon bundle

This will parse your dependencies, download apt and pip dependencies, install the dependencies into the bundle, and then install your built workspace into the bundle. The final output is located at bundle/output.tar.gz

The bundle file specification is located here. In order to execute inside the bundle context follow the following steps:

1. Extract the main archive.
2. Extract bundle.tar into your desired directory.
3. Set the environment variable BUNDLE_CURRENT_PREFIX to the location of your extracted bundle.tar.
4. Source $BUNDLE_CURRENT_PREFIX/setup.sh.
5. The bundle is now activated in your shell's environment. You can execute commands contained within the bundle.

To setup my workspace I generally pull down:

• colcon-core (https://github.com/colcon/colcon-core.git)
• colcon-ros (https://github.com/colcon/colcon-ros.git)
• colcon-bundle (https://github.com/colcon/colcon-bundle)
• colcon-ros-bundle (https://github.com/colcon/colcon-ros-bundle)

There are many more colcon packages, it can be useful to pull them down to look at how different extensions and other functionality is implemented.

To run tests execute pytest in the root directory. Install dependencies using pip3 install -r requirements_devel.txt. You might need to apt-get install enchant to install the spellchecker.

To view stdout from a test while running pytest use the -s flag.

I run these packages inside of docker containers since I'm running OSX and this only supports Ubuntu currently.

Build Container: docker run -it -v $(pwd):/workspace ros:kinetic-ros-base /bin/bash

Run Container: docker run -it -v $(pwd):/workspace ubuntu:xenial /bin/bash

I generally cd into my workspace which has the package folders and then start the container. This docker command mounts pwd to/workspace. Once in the container I cd /workspace and then execute:

1. apt-get update
2. apt-get install -y python3-pip python3-apt
3. pip3 install --upgrade pip
4. export PATH=/usr/local/bin/pip3:$PATH
5. /usr/local/bin/pip3 install --editable ./colcon-bundle
6. /usr/local/bin/pip3 install --editable ./colcon-ros-bundle

Inside of a ROS1 workspace execute the following:

1. rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y
2. colcon build
3. colcon bundle

To run the bundle you should start up a Xenial docker container with the bundle mounted. Set BUNDLE_CURRENT_PREFIX equal to the location of your extracted bundle folder. Then source setup.sh located at the top level of the bundle.

To create a tarball of this python package run: python setup.py sdist

This will create a tarball in the dist/ directory.

When we create the bundle we choose not to include certain packages that are included by default in most Linuxd distributions. To create this blacklist for Ubuntu I ran the following on a ubuntu:xenial container.

apt list --installed | sed 's/^\(.*\)\/.*$/\1/' on a base image.