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Creating a workspace for catkin
Description: This tutorial covers how to setup a catkin workspace in which one or more catkin packages can be built.Keywords: catkin workspace
Tutorial Level: BEGINNER
Next Tutorial: Creating catkin packages
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Contents
Prerequisites
This tutorial assumes that you have installed catkin and sourced your environment. If you installed catkin via apt-get for ROS $ROS_DISTRO, your command would look like this:
$ source /opt/ros/$ROS_DISTRO/setup.bash
Let's create and build a catkin workspace:
$ mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src $ cd ~/catkin_ws/ $ catkin_make
The catkin_make command is a convenience tool for working with catkin workspaces. Running it the first time in your workspace, it will create a CMakeLists.txt link in your 'src' folder.
Python 3 users in ROS Melodic and earlier: note, if you are building ROS from source to achieve Python 3 compatibility, and have setup your system appropriately (ie: have the Python 3 versions of all the required ROS Python packages installed, such as catkin) the first catkin_make command in a clean catkin workspace must be:
$ catkin_make -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python3
This will configure catkin_make with Python 3. You may then proceed to use just catkin_make for subsequent builds.
Additionally, if you look in your current directory you should now have a 'build' and 'devel' folder. Inside the 'devel' folder you can see that there are now several setup.*sh files. Sourcing any of these files will overlay this workspace on top of your environment. To understand more about this see the general catkin documentation: catkin. Before continuing source your new setup.*sh file:
$ source devel/setup.bash
To make sure your workspace is properly overlayed by the setup script, make sure ROS_PACKAGE_PATH environment variable includes the directory you're in.
$ echo $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH /home/youruser/catkin_ws/src:/opt/ros/kinetic/share
Next you should go ahead and learn how to use the workspace.
If you are following the ROS tutorials series instead of the catkin tutorials, please continue with Creating a ROS Package.
