Catkin

Catkin is a collection of CMake macros and associated code used to build packages used in ROS.

It has been introduced as part of the Fuerte release where it was used for a small set of base packages. For Groovy it as been significantly modified and is used by a large set of packages.

This version of the documentation is specific to the Groovy release (or later).

Key benefits of catkin:

• Standard compliance (FHS, Cmake)
• Convenient and fast configuration of multiple projects
• Fast build of multiple projects
• Support for C++ and python projects
• Build-space can be used like an install-space (since groovy)

Installation

Prerequisites:

catkin has the following dependencies:

• CMake - A cross-platform, open-source build system.
• Python - Python is a general-purpose, interpreted high-level programming language.
• catkin_pkg - A Python runtime library for catkin.
• empy - A Python template library.
• nose - A Python testing framework.
• GTest - A cpp unittest framework from Google.

You can resolve these dependencies on Ubuntu with this command:

sudo apt-get install cmake python-catkin-pkg python-empy python-nose libgtest-dev

If you are not on Ubuntu you can also install catkin_pkg from PyPi via pip.

catkin itself is distributed as binary debian package for Ubuntu, it can be installed via:

sudo apt-get install ros-groovy-catkin

However installing ROS will also install catkin.

Code & tickets

Catkin	http://github.com/ros/catkin
Issues	http://github.com/ros/catkin/issues
A list of catkinized ROS packages	https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/ releases/groovy.yaml

Contents

• User Guide
  • How to build the docs
  • Finding components (recommended method)
  • Internals of the generated find_package() infrastructure
  • Handling of setup.py
  • CMake coding standards
• Advanced Users Guide
  • Migrating from Fuerte catkin
  • How to bootstrap ROS from source
  • Variables
  • Environment files
  • Glossary
• Developers Guide
  • Design sketch
  • Pre- and Post-installation Disk Layout reference
  • Code Generation
  • Extracted CMake API reference
  • Catkin Maintainers guide
  • Upload catkin documentation
  • Catkin Python API