Home

ROS 2 installation on WSL2

In this guide, you will learn how to install ROS 2 in the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2).

Table of Contents

• ROS 2 installation on WSL2
  • Prerequisites
  • 1. Setup Sources
  • 2. Install ROS 2 packages
  • 3. Environment setup
  • 4. References

Prerequisites

• Open a WSL2 terminal
• Check locale settings by running locale command in the terminal. The output should be similar to the following:

• If the output is not en_US.UTF-8, you need to set the locale to en_US.UTF-8 by running the following commands:

    sudo locale-gen en_US en_US.UTF-8
    sudo update-locale LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
  

1. Setup Sources

Add the ROS 2 apt repository to your sources list.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install curl gnupg2 lsb-release software-properties-common

sudo add-apt-repository universe

sudo curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/ros.key -o /usr/share/keyrings/ros-archive-keyring.gpg

echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/ros-archive-keyring.gpg] http://packages.ros.org/ros2/ubuntu $(. /etc/os-release && echo $UBUNTU_CODENAME) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros2.list > /dev/null

2. Install ROS 2 packages

Update the package list and install the ROS 2 packages.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install -y ros-humble-desktop ros-dev-tools

3. Environment setup

The .bashrc is a text file located in your home directory (also indicated as ~). It is an hidden file, since its name starts with a dot, that is executed each time you open a new terminal. Let’s set it up to activate ROS 2 in each new terminal.

• Open the .bashrc file and add the following lines at the end. Use the command notepad.exe ~/.bashrc to open the file in a text editor.

    source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash
    source /usr/share/colcon_argcomplete/hook/colcon-argcomplete.bash
  

• To test the installation, run the following command in a new terminal:

    ros2 run demo_nodes_cpp talker
  

  You should see the following output:

    [INFO] [talker]: Publishing: 'Hello World: 1'
    [INFO] [talker]: Publishing: 'Hello World: 2'
    [INFO] [talker]: Publishing: 'Hello World: 3'
  
    and so on...
  

• In another terminal run the following command:

    ros2 run demo_nodes_py listener
  

  You should see the following output:

    [INFO] [listener]: I heard: [Hello World: 1]
    [INFO] [listener]: I heard: [Hello World: 2]
    [INFO] [listener]: I heard: [Hello World: 3]
    and so on...
  

If you see the above output, then the installation was successful.

4. References

• ROS 2 Installation Guide