Cross-post: Gazebo snap (beta)

[Jeremie]

Dear Gazebo community,

The robotics team at Canonical is committed to continuously improving the robotics developer experience in Ubuntu. As part of this effort, it is my pleasure to introduce today the Gazebo snap; a modern packaging format for Gazebo Citadel (formerly known as Ignition Gazebo Citadel) that allows you to easily install your favourite robotics simulator.

Install it now,

sudo snap install gazebo --channel=citadel/beta

and give it a try,

gazebo.gz gazebo shapes.sdf

For convenience and a seamless backward-compatible experience, consider creating snap aliases,

sudo snap alias gazebo.gz gz
sudo snap alias gazebo.gz ign

Through this announcement, we are opening today a beta testing phase in which we would like to invite all of you to participate.

We want to hear from you! Let us know how you use Gazebo and whether the Gazebo snap meets your workflow, your projects, your use cases.

As a reminder, Gazebo Citadel is compatible with ROS 2 Foxy. The recent Gazebo Fortress release will be available shortly.

Being a beta release, the Gazebo snap comes with known limitations we are still working out, notably:

• No access to the host system path (e.g. /opt/ros). Make sure that your files, such as robot models, are located in the $HOME directory.
• Custom plugins are not supported yet.

If you encounter any missing feature, any issue or bug, please do feel free to reach out to use and open a ticket on the GitHub repository.

And if you’d like to know more about snaps, have a look at our online documentation and/or feel free to reach out.

[bmagyar]

Is gazebo_ros2_control/ign_ros2_control considered a custom plugin by the snap or available as part of the bundle?

[Jeremie]

The snap currently ships with ign_ros2_control and ros2_controllers. That’s the only ‘custom’ plugin currently bundled thinking that’s a pretty common one.