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Version: 1.5.0

ROS2 workspace profiles

Setting work-space wide configurations​

Mixin​

A mixin is a tag given to a set of parameters that you may want to pass to colcon during build (maybe used with other colcon commands).

Adding Mixins to colcon​

Add the official mixin repository:

colcon mixin add default https://raw.githubusercontent.com/colcon/colcon-mixin-repository/master/index.yaml

Update the mixins:

colcon mixin update

Show the mixins:

colcon mixin show

Build with particular mixin:

colcon build --mixin rel-with-deb-info

Adding a custom Mixins​

  • Make a build_types.mixin file that defines custom mixins(JSON format)
{
    "build": {
        "debug": {
            "cmake-args": ["-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug",
                            "-DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON",
                            "-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS='-std=c++17 -Og'",
                            "-DCMAKE_C_FLAGS='-Og'"]
        },
        "rel-with-deb-info": {
            "cmake-args": ["-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo",
                            "-DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON",
                            "-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS='-std=c++17'"]
        },
        "release": {
            "cmake-args": ["-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release",
                            "-DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON",
                            "-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS='-std=c++17'"]
        }
    }
}
  • Make an index.yaml file for colcon mixin to find all the defined mixins
mixin:
  - build_types.mixin
  • Add the file to the mixin repository and update the mixins:
colcon mixin add mrs file://<path-to-directory-with-mixin-index-file>/index.yaml
colcon mixin update mrs

Add these lines to your .zshrc or .bashrc to automatically access the mixins with each new shell.

Using Mixins for build​

  • colcon uses configuration files for building, testing and installing packages. It's good practice to have a colcon_defaults.yaml in the root of your ROS2 workspace.
  • The file can have different parameters as described at https://colcon.readthedocs.io/en/released/reference/verb/build.html. For eg. using a particular mixin and limiting the threads during build would look like
build:
  parallel-workers: 8
  mixin:
    - rel-with-deb-info