You're reading the documentation for a version of ROS 2 that has reached its EOL (end-of-life), and is no longer officially supported. If you want up-to-date information, please have a look at Humble.

Pre-release Testing

Many ROS packages are provided as pre-built binaries. Usually, you will get the released version of binaries when following Installation. There are also pre-released versions of binaries that are useful for testing before making an official release. This article describes several options if you would like to try out pre-released versions of ROS binaries.

Debian testing repository

For Debian-based operating systems, you can install binary packages from the ros-testing repository.

Make sure you have a working ROS 2 installation from Debian packages (see Installation).
Edit (with sudo) the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros2-latest.list and change ros2 with ros2-testing. For example, on Ubuntu Focal the contents should look like the following:
```
# deb http://packages.ros.org/ros2/ubuntu focal main
deb http://packages.ros.org/ros2-testing/ubuntu focal main
```
Update the apt index:
```
sudo apt update
```
You can now install individual packages from the testing repository, for example:
```
sudo apt install ros-dashing-my-just-released-package
```
Alternatively, you can move your entire ROS 2 installation to the testing repository:
```
sudo apt dist-upgrade
```
Once you are finished testing, you can switch back to the normal repository by changing back the contents of /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros2-latest.list:
```
deb http://packages.ros.org/ros2/ubuntu focal main
# deb http://packages.ros.org/ros2-testing/ubuntu focal main
```
and doing an update and upgrade:
```
sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade
```

Fat binaries

For core packages, we run nightly packaging jobs for Linux, macOS, and Windows. These packaging jobs produce archives with pre-built binaries that can be downloaded and extracted to your filesystem.

Make sure you have all dependencies installed according to the latest development setup for your platform.
Go to https://ci.ros2.org/view/packaging/ and select a packaging job from the list corresponding to your platform.
Under the heading “Last Successful Artifacts” you should see a download link (e.g. for Windows, ros2-package-windows-AMD64.zip).
Download and extract the archive to your file system.

To use the fat binary installation, source the setup.* file that can be found in the root of the archive.

source path/to/extracted/archive/setup.bash

source path/to/extracted/archive/setup.bash

call path\to\extracted\archive\setup.bat

Docker

For Linux, there is also a nightly Docker image based on the nightly fat archive.

Pull the Docker image:
```
docker pull osrf/ros2:nightly
```
Start an interactive container:
```
docker run -it osrf/ros2:nightly
```

For support on running GUI applications in Docker, take a look at the tutorial User GUI’s with Docker or the tool rocker.