action-ros-buildfarm

GitHub Actions for building and testing ROS packages using the exact same pipeline as the ROS buildfarm.

Designed for these use cases:

• Validate that builds will succeed when packages are released into a ROS distribution
• Enable native packaging for creation of custom/private distributions outside the centralized ROS system

Actions

Action	Purpose
setup	Install ros_buildfarm
ci	Build and test using the prerelease pipeline (no rosdistro needed)

---

Setup action

Installs ros_buildfarm and its dependencies. Mainly used automatically by the other actions as an initial step. Use directly if you need to run buildfarm scripts yourself.

- uses: ros-tooling/action-ros-buildfarm/setup@main

Input	Required	Default	Description
ros_buildfarm_ref	no		Git ref to install from GitHub instead of PyPI

---

CI action

Runs your ROS packages through the same Docker + rosdep + colcon pipeline the buildfarm uses. Because it uses the prerelease job approach, your package does not need to be registered in any rosdistro.

- uses: ros-tooling/action-ros-buildfarm/ci@main
  with:
    ros_distro: rolling
    os_code_name: noble

By default, the contents of github.workspace are copied into the build workspace and built. You can also specify additional repos via custom_repos or underlay_repos.

Inputs

Input	Required	Default	Description
ros_distro	yes		ROS distribution (e.g. rolling, humble)
os_code_name	yes		OS version (e.g. noble, jammy)
config_url	no	official ROS 2 config	Buildfarm config index URL
config_name	no	default	Config name within the index
os_name	no	ubuntu	OS name
arch	no	amd64	Target architecture
source_dir	no	github.workspace	Directory of package source to build. Set to '' to skip.
underlay_repos	no		Space-separated repo names from rosdistro to include
custom_repos	no		Newline-separated name:type:url:branch for repos not in rosdistro
abort_on_test_failure	no	false	Fail the job if tests fail
upload_test_results	no	true	Upload JUnit XML results as an artifact

Outputs

Output	Description
underlay_test_result	Exit code of the test suite
install_dir	Path to the built install space (use as underlay for downstream)

Using a custom mini-distro config

If you maintain your own rosdistro and buildfarm config, set config_url to your own index:

- uses: ros-tooling/action-ros-buildfarm/ci@main
  with:
    config_url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/myorg/my_buildfarm_config/main/index.yaml
    ros_distro: my_distro
    os_code_name: noble

---

Developing

Formatting and linting standards are maintained via pre-commit hooks, configured in .pre-commit-config.yaml.

To have them run locally on commit, install once in the local checkout:

pre-commit install