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.

Installing ROS 2 on macOS

Table of Contents

System requirements
Installing prerequisites
Disable System Integrity Protection (SIP)
Downloading ROS 2
Install additional DDS implementations (optional)
Environment setup
Try some examples
Build your own packages
Troubleshooting
Uninstall

This page explains how to install ROS 2 on macOS from a pre-built binary package.

System requirements 

We support OS X El Capitan and macOS Sierra (10.11.x and 10.12.x).

Installing prerequisites 

You need the following things installed before installing ROS 2.

brew (needed to install more stuff; you probably already have this):
- Follow installation instructions at http://brew.sh/
- Optional: Check that brew is happy with your system configuration by running:
```
  brew doctor


Fix any problems that it identifies.
```

Use brew to install more stuff:

brew install python3

# install asio and tinyxml2 for Fast-RTPS
brew install asio tinyxml2

# install dependencies for robot state publisher
brew install tinyxml eigen pcre poco

# OpenCV isn't a dependency of ROS 2, but it is used by some demos.
brew install opencv

# install OpenSSL for DDS-Security
brew install openssl

# install Qt for RViz
brew install qt freetype assimp

# install dependencies for rcl_logging_log4cxx
brew install log4cxx

Install rqt dependencies

brew install sip pyqt5

Fix some path names when looking for sip stuff during install (see ROS 1 wiki):

ln -s /usr/local/share/sip/Qt5 /usr/local/share/sip/PyQt5

brew install graphviz

python3 -m pip install pygraphviz pydot
Install SROS2 dependencies

python3 -m pip install lxml

Install additional runtime dependencies for command-line tools:

python3 -m pip install catkin_pkg empy lark-parser pyparsing pyyaml setuptools argcomplete

Disable System Integrity Protection (SIP)

macOS/OS X versions >=10.11 have System Integrity Protection enabled by default. So that SIP doesn’t prevent processes from inheriting dynamic linker environment variables, such as DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH, you’ll need to disable it following these instructions.

Downloading ROS 2 

Go to the releases page: https://github.com/ros2/ros2/releases
Download the latest package for macOS; let’s assume that it ends up at ~/Downloads/ros2-release-distro-date-macos-amd64.tar.bz2.
- Note: there may be more than one binary download option which might cause the file name to differ.

Unpack it:

mkdir -p ~/ros2_crystal
cd ~/ros2_crystal
tar xf ~/Downloads/ros2-release-distro-date-macos-amd64.tar.bz2

Install additional DDS implementations (optional)

If you would like to use another DDS or RTPS vendor besides the default, eProsima’s Fast RTPS, you can find instructions here.

Environment setup 

Source the ROS 2 setup file:

. ~/ros2_crystal/ros2-osx/setup.bash

Try some examples 

In one terminal, set up the ROS 2 environment as described above and then run a C++ talker:

ros2 run demo_nodes_cpp talker

In another terminal, set up the ROS 2 environment and then run a Python listener:

ros2 run demo_nodes_py listener

You should see the talker saying that it’s Publishing messages and the listener saying I heard those messages. This verifies both the C++ and Python APIs are working properly. Hooray!

See the tutorials and demos for other things to try.

If you installed your workspace with colcon as instructed above, “uninstalling” could be just a matter of opening a new terminal and not sourcing the workspace’s setup file. This way, your environment will behave as though there is no Crystal install on your system.
If you’re also trying to free up space, you can delete the entire workspace directory with:
```
rm -rf ~/ros2_crystal
```