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ROS package access

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rospkg documentation

The rospkg Python module provides basic utilities for querying information about ROS packages, stacks, and distributions. There are several basic APIs: ROS environment, RosPack/RosStack, OS detection, and distributions.

The environment APIs enable access to environment settings that define the ROS package/stack filesystem configuration. The RosPack and RosStack APIs are similar to the rospack and rosstack command-line tools and provide information about dependency, location, and other package/stack metadata. The Manifest class provides access to a specific package/stack’s manifest information. NOTE: the Manifest class API is still volatile. Where possible, use the relevant RosPack/RosStack APIs to access manifest-related information instead (e.g. dependency relationships).

The rospkg.distro sub-module provides access to ROS distribution files, which describe collections of ROS stacks releases. This API is module is still unstable and mainly supports internal tools.

Example:

import rospkg

ros_root = rospkg.get_ros_root()

r = rospkg.RosPack()
depends = r.get_depends('roscpp')
path = r.get_path('rospy')

Common API

exception rospkg.ResourceNotFound

Requested resource (e.g. package/stack) could not be found.

rospkg.__version__

Version of this module.

Installation

Manual installation

rospkg is available on pypi and can be installed via pip

pip install -U rospkg

or easy_install:

easy_install -U rospkg

For debian-based OSes it’s available via apt.

apt-get install python-rospkg

Using rospkg

The rospkg module is meant to be used as a normal Python module. After it has been installed, you can import it normally and do not need to declare as a ROS package dependency.

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