You're reading the documentation for a version of ROS 2 that has reached its EOL (end-of-life), and is no longer officially supported. If you want up-to-date information, please have a look at Galactic.

Distributions

What is a Distribution?

See wiki.ros.org/Distributions.

List of Distributions

Distro	Release date	EOL date
Foxy Fitzroy	June 5th, 2020	May 2023
Eloquent Elusor	Nov 22nd, 2019	Nov 2020
Dashing Diademata	May 31st, 2019	May 2021
Crystal Clemmys	December 14th, 2018	Dec 2019
Bouncy Bolson	July 2nd, 2018	Jul 2019
Ardent Apalone	December 8th, 2017	Dec 2018
beta3	September 13th, 2017	Dec 2017
beta2	July 5th, 2017	Sep 2017
beta1	December 19th, 2016	Jul 2017
alpha1 - alpha8	August 31th, 2015	Dec 2016

Distribution Details

For details on the distributions see each release page. For the supported platforms and versions of common dependencies and other considerations, see the official ROS 2 Target Platforms REP 2000.

Future Distributions

For details on upcoming features see the roadmap.

Currently there is a new ROS 2 distribution roughly every 6 months. The following information is a best estimate and is subject to change.

Distro	Release date	Supported for	Planned changes
Galactic Geochelone	May 2021	TBD	TBD

The expectation is to release new ROS 2 distributions once per year.

Rolling Distribution

The Rolling distribution of ROS 2 serves as a staging area for future stable distributions of ROS 2 and as a collection of the most recent development releases. Unlike most stable ROS 2 distributions which have an initial release, a support window during which they are updated, and a definite end of support (see List of Distributions above) the Rolling distribution is continuously updated and is subject to in-place updates which will at times include breaking changes.

Packages released into the Rolling distribution will be automatically released into future stable distributions of ROS 2. Releasing a ROS 2 package into the Rolling distribution follows the same procedures as all other ROS 2 distributions.

ROS 2 Rolling Ridley is the rolling development distribution of ROS 2 as proposed in REP 2002. It was first introduced in June 2020.

The Rolling distribution will receive frequent and possibly compatibility-breaking releases in core packages and we recommend most people use the most recent stable distribution instead. Since new stable distributions will be created from snapshots of the Rolling distribution, package maintainers who want to make their packages available in future ROS 2 distributions can do so by releasing their packages into the Rolling distribution.