You're reading the documentation for an older, but still supported, version of ROS 2. For information on the latest version, please have a look at Jazzy.
Building a custom deb package
Many Ubuntu users install ROS 2 on their system by installing deb packages. This guide gives a short set of instructions to build local, custom deb packages.
Prerequisites
To successfully build a custom package, all of the dependencies of the package to be built must be available locally or in rosdep.
Additionally, all of the dependencies of the package should be properly declared in the package.xml
file of the package.
Install dependencies
Run the following command to install utilities needed for the build:
$ sudo apt install python3-bloom python3-rosdep fakeroot debhelper dh-python
Initialize rosdep
Initialize the rosdep database by calling:
$ sudo rosdep init
$ rosdep update
Note that the rosdep init
command may fail if it has already been initialized in the past; this can safely be ignored.
Build the deb from the package
Run the following commands to build the deb:
$ cd /path/to/pkg_source # this should be the directory that contains the package.xml
$ bloom-generate rosdebian
$ fakeroot debian/rules binary
Assuming that all required dependencies are available and that compilation succeeds, the new package will be available in the parent directory of this directory.