Distributions

What is a Distribution?

A ROS distribution is a versioned set of ROS packages. These are akin to Linux distributions (e.g. Ubuntu). The purpose of the ROS distributions is to let developers work against a relatively stable codebase until they are ready to roll everything forward. Therefore once a distribution is released, we try to limit changes to bug fixes and non-breaking improvements for the core packages (every thing under ros-desktop-full). That generally applies to the whole community, but for “higher” level packages, the rules are less strict, and so it falls to the maintainers of a given package to avoid breaking changes.

List of Distributions

Below is a list of current and historic ROS 2 distributions. Rows in the table marked in green are the currently supported distributions.

Distro	Release date	EOL date	ROS Boss
Jazzy Jalisco	May 23, 2024	May 2029	Marco A. Gutiérrez
Iron Irwini	May 23, 2023	December 4, 2024	Yadunund Vijay
Humble Hawksbill	May 23, 2022	May 2027	Audrow Nash
Galactic Geochelone	May 23, 2021	December 9, 2022	Scott Logan
Foxy Fitzroy	June 5, 2020	June 20, 2023	Jacob Perron / Dharini Dutia
Eloquent Elusor	November 22, 2019	November 2020	Michael Carroll
Dashing Diademata	May 31, 2019	May 2021	Steven! Ragnarök
Crystal Clemmys	December 14, 2018	December 2019	Steven! Ragnarök
Bouncy Bolson	July 2, 2018	July 2019	Mikael Arguedas / Steven! Ragnarök
Ardent Apalone	December 8, 2017	December 2018	Steven! Ragnarök
beta3	September 13, 2017	December 2017
beta2	July 5, 2017	September 2017
beta1	December 19, 2016	Jul 2017
alpha1 - alpha8	August 31, 2015	December 2016

Future Distributions

For details on upcoming features see the roadmap.

There is a new ROS 2 distribution released yearly on May 23rd (World Turtle Day).

Distro	Release date	Logo	EOL date
Kilted Kaiju	May 2025	TBD	Nov 2026

Rolling Distribution

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

The Rolling distribution of ROS 2 serves two purposes:

it is a staging area for future stable distributions of ROS 2, and
it is a collection of the most recent development releases.

As the name implies, Rolling is continuously updated and can have in-place updates that include breaking changes. We recommend that most people use the most recent stable distribution instead (see List of Distributions).

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.