Overview

Installing rosdep

Note

If you want to use rosdep with ROS1/2, you should install rosdep following their installation instructions:

• ROS1 installation instructions

• ROS2 installation instructions [1]

[1]

In ROS2 Foxy and beyond, rosdep is included in the ros-dev-tools package.

It is recommended to use the system package manager to install rosdep.

rosdep2 is a system package under Ubuntu and Debian:

# Ubuntu >= 20.04 (Focal)
sudo apt-get install python3-rosdep
# Debian >=11 (Bullseye)
sudo apt-get install python3-rosdep2

If rosdep doesn’t exist in your package manager, you can install it using pip or easy_install:

# Python 2
sudo pip install -U rosdep
# Python 3
sudo pip3 install -U rosdep
# easy_install
sudo easy_install -U rosdep rospkg

Setting up rosdep

rosdep needs to be initialized and updated to use:

sudo rosdep init
rosdep update

sudo rosdep init will create a sources list directory in /etc/ros/rosdep/sources.list.d that controls where rosdep gets its data from.

rosdep update reads through this sources list to initialize your local database.

Updating rosdep

You can update your rosdep database by running:

rosdep update

Installating rosdeps

rosdep takes in the name of a ROS stack or package that you wish to install the system dependencies for.

Common installation workflow:

$ rosdep check ros_comm
All system dependencies have been satisfied
$ rosdep install geometry

If you’re worried about rosdep install bringing in system dependencies you don’t want, you can run rosdep install -s <args> instead to “simulate” the installation. You will be able to see the commands that rosdep would have run.

Example:

$ rosdep install -s ros_comm
#[apt] Installation commands:
  sudo apt-get install libapr1-dev
  sudo apt-get install libaprutil1-dev
  sudo apt-get install libbz2-dev
  sudo apt-get install liblog4cxx10-dev
  sudo apt-get install pkg-config
  sudo apt-get install python-imaging
  sudo apt-get install python-numpy
  sudo apt-get install python-paramiko
  sudo apt-get install python-yaml

You can also query rosdep to find out more information about specific dependencies:

$ rosdep keys roscpp
pkg-config

$ rosdep resolve pkg-config
pkg-config

$ rosdep keys geometry
eigen
apr
glut
python-sip
python-numpy
graphviz
paramiko
cppunit
libxext
log4cxx
pkg-config

$ rosdep resolve eigen
libeigen3-dev

For more information, please see the command reference.