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consumer_colcon

Example showing how a colcon workspace can pick up ros-kilted from Conan as if it were a system-installed ROS distribution. Two ROS packages are built side-by-side:

  • dummy_lib — a plain ament_cmake static library with no ROS dependencies, used to demonstrate cross-package linking inside the workspace.
  • consumer_node — depends on dummy_lib and rclcpp, prints a message and starts a short-lived node.

← back to main README

How it is wired

conanfile.txt requires ros-kilted/2026.06.17 and pulls in the generators that make colcon discover ROS 2:

Generator Role
CMakeToolchain Produces conan_toolchain.cmake — pinned compiler/std/runtime for every CMake project.
CMakeDeps Generates <Pkg>-config.cmake for every Conan dependency, so find_package just works.
VCVars Sets up the MSVC environment on Windows.
ROSEnv Generates conanrosenv.{bat,sh} — exposes AMENT_PREFIX_PATH, CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH, PYTHONPATH, and the ROS install/runtime so colcon finds messages, Python tooling and runtime libraries.

Prerequisites

  • A C++17 compiler.

  • CMake ≥ 3.22 (the profile tool-requires cmake/3.29.3).

  • colcon and catkin_pkg available on PATH:

    python -m pip install --upgrade colcon-common-extensions catkin_pkg

    On macOS, make sure the python that runs colcon is the same one that ament_cmake picks up via find_package(Python3) — different Python versions on PATH cause catkin_pkg to land in the wrong site-packages. The CI example pins this explicitly with -DPython3_EXECUTABLE=....

Build & run

From this directory:

conan install . --profile=../../profiles/ros --build=missing

Activate the Conan-generated ROS environment and let colcon drive the rest:

Windows (cmd):

call build\generators\conanrosenv.bat
colcon build --event-handlers console_cohesion+
call install\setup.bat

ros2 run consumer_node consumer_node

macOS / Linux (bash/zsh):

. ./build/Release/generators/conanrosenv.sh
colcon build --event-handlers console_cohesion+
. ./install/setup.sh

ros2 run consumer_node consumer_node

ros2 itself is shipped by ros-kilted (Scripts/ros2.exe on Windows, bin/ros2 on macOS/Linux) and conanrosenv.{bat,sh} puts it on PATH together with the AMENT_PREFIX_PATH / PYTHONPATH entries it needs. Sourcing the workspace's install/setup.{bat,sh} then prepends the freshly built consumer_node to that AMENT_PREFIX_PATH, so ros2 run (or any other ros2 subcommand) resolves it like on a system-installed ROS 2.

If you prefer to skip ros2, the executable is also reachable directly from the install tree:

install\consumer_node\lib\consumer_node\consumer_node.exe
./install/consumer_node/lib/consumer_node/consumer_node

Expected output (truncated):

[dummy_lib] hello from library
[INFO] [...] [colcon_consumer_node]: colcon consumer_node: rclcpp linked and node started.

The exact CI invocation (with the Python-interpreter pinning mentioned above) lives in ci_test_example.py.