Rotary release#

Rotary is a rolling release stream of Gazebo built continuously from the main branches of every Gazebo library. Unlike the dated codename releases (Fortress, Harmonic, Jetty, …), Rotary has no fixed version: it is built every night. It is intended for Gazebo maintainers, continuous integration systems, and early adopters who want to test unreleased changes before they ship in a named collection.

Warning

Rotary is a rolling, unstable stream. Breakage is expected, and versions may change under you on every apt upgrade or brew upgrade. Rotary is not recommended for production use. New Gazebo users should install one of the binary releases listed in Releases instead.

Package naming#

Wherever a Gazebo package name contains gz-, a rotary- infix is injected to produce the Rotary alias. The aliases point to unversioned upstream packages, so installing a Rotary alias always pulls whatever is currently being built from main.

Ubuntu#

The package names in the table below are examples illustrating the aliasing rule:

Regular package

Rotary alias

libgz-cmake-dev

libgz-rotary-cmake-dev

gz-plugin-cli

gz-rotary-plugin-cli

python3-gz-math

python3-gz-rotary-math

libsdformat-dev (*)

libgz-rotary-sdformat-dev

(*) sdformat is a special case: its package names do not contain gz-, so the rotary alias adds a gz-rotary- prefix.

Homebrew (macOS)#

Regular formula

Rotary alias

gz-mathN

gz-rotary-math

sdformatN

gz-rotary-sdformat

Umbrella metapackage#

On both Ubuntu and Homebrew, the gz-rotary metapackage pulls in the full set of rotary libraries, mirroring how gz-jetty or gz-harmonic work for named collections.

Installing Rotary on Ubuntu#

Note

Rotary binaries are published into the existing nightly apt repository at http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-nightly, so the versioning scheme documented in Ubuntu versioning in nightly and prerelease binaries applies to Rotary unchanged.

First install the prerequisite tools:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install curl lsb-release gnupg

Add the OSRF GPG key and configure the nightly apt repository (which hosts Rotary packages) that needs the stable repository also to work:

sudo curl https://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo.gpg --output /usr/share/keyrings/pkgs-osrf-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/pkgs-osrf-archive-keyring.gpg] http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-stable $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gazebo-stable.list > /dev/null
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/pkgs-osrf-archive-keyring.gpg] http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-nightly $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gazebo-nightly.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update

Then install the Rotary metapackage:

sudo apt-get install gz-rotary

All Rotary libraries should be ready to use and the gz sim app ready to run.

Uninstalling Rotary#

sudo apt remove gz-rotary && sudo apt autoremove

Installing Rotary on macOS (Homebrew)#

Rotary formulae are published through the osrf/simulation tap:

brew tap osrf/simulation
brew trust osrf/simulation
brew install gz-rotary

Per-library formulae are also available using the gz-rotary-<library> naming scheme, for example:

brew install gz-rotary-math gz-rotary-sim

The initial rollout of Rotary brew formulae is tracked in osrf/homebrew-simulation#3287.

Windows#

There is currently no binary distribution of Rotary on Windows. Windows users who want to run Rotary need to build it from source.

The Source Installation on Windows 10 or 11 guide describes the full toolchain (Visual Studio, Pixi, colcon) and uses the Rotary collection file, collection-rotary.yaml, from gazebo-tooling/gazebodistro in its vcs import step:

vcs import --input https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gazebo-tooling/gazebodistro/master/collection-rotary.yaml src/