rosdep is a command-line tool for installing system dependencies.

New documentation

As of ROS fuerte, rosdep is now a stand-alone tool that you can download and use separately: External rosdep documentation.

Quick reference

Installing rosdep

Do prefer apt over pip as it's updated automatically and faster.

# ROS Noetic
sudo apt-get install python3-rosdep
# ROS Melodic and earlier
sudo apt-get install python-rosdep

On non ubuntu platforms

Use pip:

sudo pip install -U rosdep

Initializing rosdep

Needs to be called only once after installation:

sudo rosdep init

Needs to be called at least once or when updating (there might be new needed definitions your local installation of rosdep doesn't know about yet):

rosdep update

• As of version 0.14.0 rosdep update will only fetch ROS package names for non-EOL ROS distributions. If you are still using an EOL ROS distribution (which you probably shouldn't) you can pass the argument --include-eol-distros to also fetch the ROS package names of those.

If you experienced network error, you may use a mirror site like TUNA and BFSU.

Using rosdep

Install dependency of a particular package

You can use rosdep and catkin to build any package in the ROS repository. Say that you want to build a package called AMAZING_PACKAGE, that you hadn't built on your machine before.

rosdep install AMAZING_PACKAGE

Install dependency of all packages in the workspace

This usecase shows even more powerful feature of rosdep.

Go to the top directory of your catkin workspace where the source code of the ROS packages you'd like to use are. Then run:

rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y

This command magically installs all the packages that the packages in your catkin workspace depend upon but are missing on your computer.

Use source-installed rosdep

Clone the development repository. This doesn't need to be done in a directory in ROS_PACKAGE_PATH. Then at its top directory, source setup.sh. In concrete:

$ git clone https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rosdep
$ cd rosdep
$ source setup.sh

Then calling rosdep should use the source just downloaded.

Change list

See changelog in the development repository.

Bugs/Feature Requests

View or file new issues on github

Tutorial

See this page. There's also a list of rosdep tutorials.