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Catkin Command Line Tools

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HannesSommer edited this page Jun 24, 2014 · 19 revisions

Short reasoning behind this:

Catkin can be a little slow for two reasons:

  • Catkin processes the dependencies of your workspace before starting to build the actual packages.
  • Catkin parallelizes the build of object files inside a package, but does not build packages in parallel.

One reason for that is that catkin creates a single make target for all packages in your source space. A new command called catkin-make-isolated builds each package in the workspace individually (cmi ROS). This can be parallelized better by resolving dependencies on the fly and therefore speeding up your build significantly.

This feature is part of the catkin-tools, which is the preferred way of building catkin workspaces.

Documentation of catkin-tools

Can be found here.

Good to know commands of catkin

  • catkin build: Verb for building a catkin workspace <commands/catkin_build>
  • catkin list: Verb for finding and listing information about catkin packages <commands/catkin_list>

Adding command aliases

THIS IS PARTIALLY OUTDATED : since https://github.com/catkin/catkin_tools/commit/518a2867b09a1020a1299e9736df04dc89d9466a there is no '--merge-devel' option anymore. Instead it is the default behavior! Of course there is still the possibility to add verbs like explained below but for the particular example there is no reason/user anymore!

We advocate the use of --merge-devel whenever using catkin-tools but it can be annoying to type this all the time.

Thankfully, catkin tools has a mechanism for adding command aliases. Go to ~/.config/catkin/verb_aliases and add a file called 01-asl-aliases.yaml. Add the following text:

bmd: build --merge-devel
build-md: build --merge-devel

This defines two new aliases that will run build --merge-devel for you if you type

catkin bmd

or

catkin build-md

Installing pcmi/catkin as part of catkin-tools:

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools
cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/catkin/catkin_tools.git
cd catkin_tools
sudo python setup.py install

Using parallel catkin

From now on you can issue a parallel catkin_make by using the command catkin build where you have used catkin_make before, e.g.:

cd $CATKIN_WS
catkin build --merge-devel

Debugging failing packages

Catkin-tools debugging documentation

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