Colcon plugin¶

The colcon plugin manages the colcon build tool inside a part. It supports projects that build with CMake and Python packages that build with setup.py.

It stores build artifacts in the $CRAFT_PART_INSTALL path.

This plugin requires core24 or higher.

Keys¶

This plugin provides the following unique keys.

colcon-cmake-args¶

Type: list of strings

Arguments to pass to cmake projects. Note that any arguments here which match colcon arguments need to be prefixed with a space. Arguments to pass to CMake projects. If an argument has the same name as a colcon argument, it must be prefixed with a space to avoid a collision. A space in an argument is made literal by wrapping the argument in quotation marks (“).

colcon-packages¶

Type: string

List of colcon packages to build. If not specified, all packages in the workspace will be built. If set to an empty list ([]), no packages will be built, which could be useful if you only want Debian packages in the snap.

colcon-packages-ignore¶

Type: string

List of packages for colcon to ignore.

Environment variables¶

The plugin sets:

AMENT_PYTHON_EXECUTABLE to “/usr/bin/python3”. This is required for ROS 2 packages.
COLCON_PYTHON_EXECUTABLE to “/usr/bin/python3”.

Dependencies¶

The colcon plugin needs the colcon executable to build the source.

The colcon plugin needs the colcon-core package to start colcon, gcc/g++ and cmake to build C/C++ packages. Additionally, extensions like colcon-cmake, colcon-package-selection, colcon-python-setup-py and colcon-parallel-executor are needed to support basic builds. These dependencies are provided and handled by the plugin.

How it works¶

During the build step the plugin performs the following actions:

Source colcon workspaces present in any stage snaps, and on the system.
Call colcon build with any colcon-specific keywords set in the part, with --install-base $CRAFT_PART_INSTALL to install the built artifacts

Example¶

The following snippet declares a part using the colcon plugin. It fetches the GoogleTest source code from GitHub, and builds only the gtest package. It sets the CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE to RelWithDebInfo to generate debug symbols from the build:

parts:
  hello:
    source: https://github.com/google/googletest.git
    plugin: colcon
    colcon-cmake-args:
      - -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
    colcon-packages:
        - gtest