Building RQt from source

We’ve provided our development setup here to aid future users in easily extending RQt by creating their own plugins. We encourage you to contribute those plugins back to the ros-visualization GitHub repository!

System Requirements

These instructions are written for the target platforms for Crystal Clemmys (see REP).

  • Ubuntu Bionic Beaver 18.04 64-bit

  • Mac OSX Sierra 10.12.x

  • Windows 10 with Visual Studio 2017

Other Requirements

  • In ROS 2 Crystal the minimum Qt version is Qt5

Building From Source

In order to build RQt from source, first create a ROS 2 workspace at ~/ros2_ws/. This is step is already covered in building ROS 2 from source instructions, so we skip it here.

Download RQt Repositories

cd ~/ros2_ws
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PickNikRobotics/rqt2_setup/master/rqt2.repos
vcs import src --force < rqt2.repos

As an alternative to the hosted .repos file you can use rosinstall_generator to generate a custom one:

rosinstall_generator --rosdistro crystal --upstream-development --repos python_qt_binding qt_gui_core rqt <more-repos-with-rqt-plugins> > rqt2.repos

Install Dependencies

For non-Linux platforms, see the macOS RQt source install page or the Windows 10 RQt source install page before continuing here.

rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro bouncy -y --skip-keys "console_bridge fastcdr fastrtps libopensplice67 rti-connext-dds-5.3.1 urdfdom_headers"

Build The Workspace

Generally building a workspace is as simple as:

colcon build

For Windows, it is recommended to use the --merge-install option.

colcon build --merge-install

Advanced Colcon usages:

  • Show verbose output on the console:

    colcon build –event-handlers console_direct+

  • Only build one package and its dependencies:

    colcon build –packages-up-to rqt_shell

Source your environment

Linux or macOS

. install/local_setup.bash

Windows

call install/local_setup.bat

Using RQt

See Overview of RQt.