Minimal ROS2 Installation

Question

Is there a repo file available that produces a minimal ROS2 installation similar to ros-base from ROS1?

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Originally posted by david.hodo on ROS Answers with karma: 395 on 2019-06-10

Post score: 0

Answer 1

The repos file is an artifact of our development process from before ROS2 distros existed. You can get what you want using the rosinstall_generator just like you can with ROS 1 distros. e.g.

Release tags:

rosinstall_generator --deps --rosdistro dashing ros_base

Upstream tags:

rosinstall_generator --deps --upstream --rosdistro dashing ros_base

Upstream devel branches

rosinstall_generator --deps --upstream-devel --rosdistro dashing ros_base

For faster checkouts you don't plan to edit you can use the tarballs option.

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Originally posted by tfoote with karma: 58457 on 2019-06-10

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 3

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Original comments

Comment by david.hodo on 2019-06-10:
Awesome. I didn't even think to try the old setup. Thanks.

Comment by mechapancake on 2020-02-06:
Looking for the same thing as OP. I've been following the ROS 2 build guide here: https://index.ros.org/doc/ros2/Installation/Eloquent/Linux-Development-Setup/

For a minimal install, I should run rosinstall_generator prior to the colcon build command, correct?

Comment by tfoote on 2020-02-06:
You should replace the wget of the 'ros2.repos' file with the rosinstall_generator command.

Comment by nealtanner on 2021-01-13:
How big should the ros_base download be? I tried this with foxy and it downloaded >800 MB of source repos.

Comment by tfoote on 2021-01-14:
That's a little higher than I'd expect. If you check out the tarballs with just the latest checkout I see 124MB. Dependeing on what packages you're pulling the repositories from you can have a good amount of historical versions included in the default clone of the repositories, especially the release repositories which are not optimized for minimal git clones.