Installing ROS2 on Windows

Current Package Support:

  • All of base ROS2

  • MoveIt2 (full support)

  • Navigation2 (Gazebo, path planning)

Not Yet Supported:

  • Realsense

  • RTAB-Map

  • warehouse-ros-sqlite

If you need any more packages ported for Windows, talk to Akash!

Environment Setup

Let’s start by installing Chocolatey, which is a package manager for Windows. In order to install it, you will need to run the commands it says in an administrator powershell.

Then, run the following commands to install all the dependencies. If you already have Python installed, then don’t run that line. If you already have cmake installed, please uninstall it and let chocolatey install it.

choco install -y python --version 3.8.3
choco install -y cmake.install --installargs '"ADD_CMAKE_TO_PATH=System"'
choco install -y vcredist2013 vcredist140 ninja

Then, you need to upgrade pip and then install all the pip packages. Make sure to open a new powershell window. This one does not have to be an administrator one.

python -m pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -U vcstool colcon-common-extensions catkin_pkg cryptography EmPy ifcfg lark-parser lxml `
netifaces numpy opencv-python pyparsing pyyaml setuptools rosdistro pydot PyQt5

Then, you need install MSVC which is Microsoft’s C++ compiler. Download Visual Studio Community 2022. Make sure to have Desktop development with C+ checked and no C++ CMake tools are checked.

Now, it’s time to actually install ROS2. Go ahead and run the following commands:

mkdir -p C:/opt/ros/foxy
cd C:/opt/ros/foxy
explorer .

This should open up a File Explorer window in C:/opt/ros/foxy You’ll want to download our prebuilt ROS2. Then, move the ZIP file to C:/opt/ros/foxy, and extract it. You will need 7-zip to extract it. In order to extract in the correct folder, right click the 7z file, Go to 7-Zip --> Extract files.... This will open up a window. In the Extract to: field put C:/opt/ros/foxy. That’s it! You have ROS installed.

To properly source ROS2, you’ll want to add the following line to your Powershell profile. You can access the file by running notepad $PROFILE in a Powershell terminal. This will open the file in Notepad. Add the following line to the end and save:

C:/opt/ros/foxy/x64/local_setup.ps1

That’s all!

Other Useful Setup

Using ROS on Windows is extremely annoying, so I have some recommendations to make it much better. I highly recommend you do these as well.

First, let’s install a better terminal called Windows Terminal. Open the Microsoft Store and search for Windows Terminal. Then, just click Get and Install. Now, you can open up Windows Terminal by just typing wt in the start menu. Windows Terminal allows you to have multiple tabs, better shortcuts, and just looks much cooler.

Next, let’s add some utility functions to our powershell profile to make using ROS much simpler.

Before building any ROS 2 workspace, you need to launch a powershell developer shell. Instead of having to launch a separate terminal, you can just use this utility function called setupDev to make your current terminal have the same properties.

function setupDev {
  $dir = (Get-Item .).FullName
  $vsPath = &(Join-Path ${env:ProgramFiles(x86)} "\Microsoft Visual Studio\Installer\vswhere.exe") -property installationpath
  Import-Module (Join-Path $vsPath "Common7\Tools\Microsoft.VisualStudio.DevShell.dll")
  Enter-VsDevShell -VsInstallPath $vsPath -SkipAutomaticLocation -DevCmdArguments -arch=x64
  cd $dir
}

Another issue is when there are CMake or compiler errors with MSVC, nothing is displayed. This is because error output is printed out to stdout instead of stderr and colcon doesn’t print it to the console. In order to show it, we need to enable the console_cohesion event handler.

Also, when building ROS 2 workspaces, using the default build system MSBuild is very slow. Ninja is a much faster build system. In addition, when using MSBuild, colcon build will always rebuild even if no code was changed. However, in order to use Ninja, you need to add --cmake-args -G Ninja to every single build command which can get annoying.

function colconBuild {
  colcon build --event-handlers console_cohesion+ --cmake-args -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo $args
}

Now, all that functionality can be used using colconBuild. You can even add extra flags if you want: colconBuild --packages-skip-build-finished

Verifying ROS2 Works

In order to easily verify everything is installed and working correctly run the following commands and make sure there are no errors:

In one terminal run ros2 run demo_nodes_cpp talker and in another terminal run ros2 run demo_nodes_cpp listener. If there are no errors while these run, that’s great and means that C++ nodes work for ROS2 on your machine!

Next, in one terminal run ros2 run demo_nodes_py talker and in another terminal run ros2 run demo_nodes_py listener. If there are no errors while these run, that’s great and means that python nodes work for ROS2 on your machine!