Installation Instructions for Groovy in OSX

This page describes how to install Groovy in OSX. OSX is not officially supported by ROS and the installation might fail for several reasons. This page does not (yet) contain instructions for most higher level ROS packages, only for the base system. This includes the middleware and command line tools but not much more.

Warning: The below instructions are outdated and possibly broken. Please try the new MacPorts repository.

Setup

1. Install Apple's Developer Tools (Xcode 4). After starting Xcode select "Preferences" (⌘,) >> "Downloads". In "Components" you will find Command Line Tools.

2. Install MacPorts

Next use MacPorts to install additional software.

sudo port selfupdate
sudo port install cmake libyaml yaml-cpp tinyxml pkgconfig log4cxx eigen subversion git-core mercurial google-test qt4-mac py27-six bzr

We need a specific Version of boost (1.41 to 1.47).

cd /Users/shared
svn co -r 85591 http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/trunk/dports/devel/boost boost_1_47_0_2
cd boost_1_47_0_2
sudo chown -R macports:macports Portfile files
sudo port install
cd ..
sudo rm -rf boost_1_47_0_2

Set Environment

You will need to add these lines to your ~/.profile (global) or ~/.bashrc (after running bash).

export CPATH=/opt/local/include
export LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/local/lib
export ROS_OS_OVERRIDE=osx:macports

In order for the above changes to take effect reopen the terminal or run this command:

source ~/.bashrc

Additional Tools

Finally, we need to install a few ROS python tools using pip:

sudo easy_install pip
sudo pip install -U pyyaml empy rospkg rosdep rosinstall catkin-pkg wstool

In order to use rosdep, we need to initialize it:

sudo rosdep init
rosdep update

Building ROS Base

First, check out all ROS base packages:

wstool init -j8 ~/groovy_underlay http://packages.ros.org/web/rosinstall/generate/raw/groovy/ros_comm

We need to link catkin's toplevel cmake file:

cd ~/groovy_underlay
ln -s catkin/cmake/toplevel.cmake CMakeLists.txt

Now it's time for configuring the build:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/ros/groovy  -DSETUPTOOLS_DEB_LAYOUT=OFF

The configure should not throw an error. After running it, we can finally build and install ROS:

make -j8
sudo make install

This will install everything in /opt/ros/groovy. To use our freshly built ROS installation, we need to source its setup file:

source /opt/ros/groovy/setup.bash

Now a quick check to make sure all is working

which roscore
/opt/ros/groovy/bin/roscore

Build Higher Level ROS Libraries

To Do