Getting ROS Indigo Running on OSX Yosemite

I recently worked on a project that made use of the Robot Operating System or ROS. ROS more naturally lives in the linux ecosystem, but for various reasons I wanted a ROS system in my native OSX environment.

I eventually managed to get it working, but it was not an easy task. But I took careful notes and here is the distilled result.

So first of all, read the official instructions for installing ROS. That’s the basic template of what we need to do. However, the official instructions do not work out of the box on OSX Yosemite (as of 2014).

There are 3 main things we need to do that diverge from the official instructions:

• In order to use the python in homebrew, we’ll need a patched cmake
• Fix build error regarding libvtk that appears to be specific to Yosemite
• Install a patched version of ogre and rviz

1. Make sure your brew is up-to-date.

brew update

2. Install a patched version of cmake.

First do:

brew remove cmake

which will remove any existing cmake from homebrew. Then run:

brew install nikolausdemmel/devel/cmake

This will fail with an error about a hash mismatch.

• edit /usr/local/Library/Taps/nikolausdemmel/homebrew-devel/cmake.rb
• replace: 0de4b414f9e98ff57ca7e5f6dabe835c4c0c75af with 77d49adadeafed7cfe8447188cc39b8abd125d94

Then run:

brew install nikolausdemmel/devel/cmake

again. Now you should have a patched version of cmake. (These steps were distilled from here)

3. Proceed with the first few steps from the official instructions.

brew tap ros/deps
brew tap osrf/simulation
brew tap homebrew/versions
brew tap homebrew/science
mkdir -p ~/Library/Python/2.7/lib/python/site-packages
echo "$(brew --prefix)/lib/python2.7/site-packages" >> ~/Library/Python/2.7/lib/python/site-packages/homebrew.pth
sudo easy_install pip==1.2.1
sudo pip install -U setuptools
sudo pip install -U wstool rosdep rosinstall rosinstall_generator rospkg catkin-pkg Distribute sphinx numpy pydot
sudo rosdep init

4. Tweak a dependency to fix a libvtk error on Yosemite.

• Edit: /etc/ros/rosdep/sources.list.d/20-default.list
• Replace the line with osx-homebrew.yaml with: yaml https://github.com/JeremyCade/rosdistro/raw/master/rosdep/osx-homebrew.yaml osx

(These steps were distilled from here.)

5. Fix dependency issue with image_transport.

Apparently there is a minor dependency issue with the image_transport package see here, but the easiest way to work around it is to export your homebrew library path as LIBRARY_PATH

export LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib

6. Continue with the normal instructions.

rosdep update
cd ~
mkdir ~/ros_catkin_ws
cd ~/ros_catkin_ws
rosinstall_generator desktop --rosdistro indigo --deps --wet-only --tar > indigo-desktop-wet.rosinstall
wstool init -j8 src indigo-desktop-wet.rosinstall

7. Install a patched version of ogre and rviz.

brew unlink ogre
brew install ogre1.9
brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NikolausDemmel/homebrew-simulation/ogre-fixes/gazebo2.rb
cd src
wstool set rviz --git [email protected]:ros-visualization/rviz.git -v osx_ogre_1_9
cd ..

(These steps were distilled from here.)

8. Finish the installation.

rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro indigo -y
./src/catkin/bin/catkin_make_isolated --install -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

If the stars have aligned properly, you might have a ROS install working now.