Overview

This installation type is typically only necessary if you are doing catkin-rosjava development at the official stacks level, but also enlightening if trying out various things with rosjava. Note that it wouldn't take much to extend this to a completely self-contained installation, you just need to add a few sources to the rosinstall file. For now, we use rosdep to pull in a few and only include those necessary to build rosjava and generate the core message artifacts.

Prerequisites

Get the basics.

> sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-catkin ros-indigo-rospack python-wstool

You will need JDK 8 for this installation. You can check how to install Open JDK 8 in Ubuntu 14 here.

After installation, set JAVA_HOME environment variable to the root directory of the JVM you just installed; e.g.:

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64

Sources

Core Sources

The following rosinstaller provides the core rosjava repos, the set of official message artifacts (built via the meta-package generator approach) and repos that support the android application framework.

> mkdir -p ~/rosjava/src
> wstool init -j4 ~/rosjava/src https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rosjava/rosjava/indigo/rosjava.rosinstall
> source /opt/ros/indigo/setup.bash
> cd ~/rosjava
# Make sure we've got all rosdeps and msg packages.
> rosdep update
> rosdep install --from-paths src -i -y
> catkin_make

Other Sources

Some other sources that might be of interest:

• rosjava_minimal.rosinstall - an alternative minimal installer with few message dependencies and genjava style message generation.

> mkdir -p ~/rosjava_minimal
> wstool init -j4 ~/rosjava_minimal/src https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rosjava/rosjava/indigo/rosjava_minimal.rosinstall
> source /opt/ros/indigo/setup.bash
> cd ~/rosjava_minimal
# Make sure we've got all rosdeps and msg packages.
> rosdep update
> rosdep install --from-paths src -i -y -r
# ignore it's complaints about rosjava_messages, we don't use that here
> catkin_make

Your Own Sources

You can now proceed to add your own source packages on top, either by merging with the same workspace, e.g.

> cd ~/rosjava/src
# Merging a rosinstall set
> wstool merge https://raw.githubusercontent.com/me/rosinstalls/master/my_custom_msg_repos.rosinstall
# Applying a single repo
> wstool set my_custom_msgs --git https://github.com/me/my_custom_msgs --version=indigo-devel
# Build
> cd ~/rosjava
> catkin_make

or by creating an overlay:

> mkdir -p ~/myjava/src
> cd ~/myjava/src
> wstool init -j4 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/me/rosinstalls/master/my_custom_msg_repos.rosinstall
> source ~/rosjava/devel/setup.bash
> cd ~/myjava
> rosdep update
> rosdep install --from-paths src -i -y
> catkin_make

You're now ready to start developing a shiny new catkin-rosjava package! Refer to the next tutorial on how to do just that.