a colcon-venv package to manage venv for python packages

[Briancbn]

Managing python dependencies with pip has been especially annoying. It will be great if colcon can resolve the dependencies of all packages in the workspace and install them in a virtual environment.

Such feature existed in colcon-poetry-ros, but is limited to poetry. I did a quick prototype with UV in https://github.com/Briancbn/colcon-python-project-uv#usage. You can simply run the following command to setup a venv for your workspace

colcon venv sync

Then after build, an activate.sh file will be generated. User can simply source it and deactivate them as they like

$ source ./install/activate.sh

(colcon-ws) $ deactivate

$ 

This is currently just a prototype built on UV, but it supports poetry, uv_build, setuptools, scikit-build-core packages. UV also handles locking and resolving different versions of python dependencies. We have used this internally for a few months now for convenience.

We can also leverage pixi for this too and have a tighter integration with colcon-spawn-shell.

Please let me know if this is something useful for the community.