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Distributions

What is a Distribution?

See wiki.ros.org/Distributions.

List of Distributions

Distro

Release date

Logo

EOL date

Foxy Fitzroy

June 5th, 2020

Foxy logo

May 2023

Eloquent Elusor

Nov 22nd, 2019

Eloquent logo

Nov 2020

Dashing Diademata

May 31st, 2019

Dashing logo

May 2021

Crystal Clemmys

December 14th, 2018

Crystal logo

Dec 2019

Bouncy Bolson

July 2nd, 2018

Bouncy logo

Jul 2019

Ardent Apalone

December 8th, 2017

Ardent logo

Dec 2018

beta3

September 13th, 2017

Dec 2017

beta2

July 5th, 2017

Sep 2017

beta1

December 19th, 2016

Jul 2017

alpha1 - alpha8

August 31th, 2015

Dec 2016

Distribution Details

For details on the distributions see each release page. For the supported platforms and versions of common dependencies and other considerations, see the official ROS 2 Target Platforms REP 2000.

Future Distributions

For details on upcoming features see the roadmap.

Currently there is a new ROS 2 distribution roughly every 6 months. The following information is a best estimate and is subject to change.

Distro

Release date

Supported for

Planned changes

Galactic Geochelone

May 2021

TBD

TBD

The expectation is to release new ROS 2 distributions once per year.

Rolling Distribution

The Rolling distribution of ROS 2 serves as a staging area for future stable distributions of ROS 2 and as a collection of the most recent development releases. Unlike most stable ROS 2 distributions which have an initial release, a support window during which they are updated, and a definite end of support (see List of Distributions above) the Rolling distribution is continuously updated and is subject to in-place updates which will at times include breaking changes.

Packages released into the Rolling distribution will be automatically released into future stable distributions of ROS 2. Releasing a ROS 2 package into the Rolling distribution follows the same procedures as all other ROS 2 distributions.

ROS 2 Rolling Ridley is the rolling development distribution of ROS 2 as proposed in REP 2002. It was first introduced in June 2020.

The Rolling distribution will receive frequent and possibly compatibility-breaking releases in core packages and we recommend most people use the most recent stable distribution instead. Since new stable distributions will be created from snapshots of the Rolling distribution, package maintainers who want to make their packages available in future ROS 2 distributions can do so by releasing their packages into the Rolling distribution.