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.

Running ROS 2 nodes in Docker [community-contributed]

Run two nodes in a single docker container

Pull the ROS docker image with tag “iron-desktop”.

docker pull osrf/ros:iron-desktop

Run the image in a container in interactive mode.

$ docker run -it osrf/ros:iron-desktop
root@<container-id>:/#

Your best friend is the ros2 command line help now.

root@<container-id>:/# ros2 --help

E.g. list all installed packages.

root@<container-id>:/# ros2 pkg list
(you will see a list of packages)

E.g. list all executables:

root@<container-id>:/# ros2 pkg executables
(you will see a list of <package> <executable>)

Run a minimal example of 2 C++ nodes (1 topic subscriber listener, 1 topic publisher talker) from the package demo_nodes_cpp in this container:

ros2 run demo_nodes_cpp listener &
ros2 run demo_nodes_cpp talker

Run two nodes in two separate docker containers

Open a terminal. Run the image in a container in interactive mode and launch a topic publisher (executable talker from the package demo_nodes_cpp) with ros2 run:

docker run -it --rm osrf/ros:iron-desktop ros2 run demo_nodes_cpp talker

Open a second terminal. Run the image in a container in interactive mode and launch a topic subscriber (executable listener from the package demo_nodes_cpp) with ros2 run:

docker run -it --rm osrf/ros:iron-desktop ros2 run demo_nodes_cpp listener

As an alternative to the command line invocation, you can create a docker-compose.yml file (here version 2) with the following (minimal) content:

version: '2'

services:
  talker:
    image: osrf/ros:iron-desktop
    command: ros2 run demo_nodes_cpp talker
  listener:
    image: osrf/ros:iron-desktop
    command: ros2 run demo_nodes_cpp listener
    depends_on:
      - talker

To run the containers call docker compose up in the same directory. You can close the containers with Ctrl+C.