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

• 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 software-properties-common curl gnupg2 lsb-release
sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo apt update

export ROS_APT_SOURCE_VERSION=$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/ros-infrastructure/ros-apt-source/releases/latest | grep -F "tag_name" | awk -F\" '{print $4}')

curl -L -o /tmp/ros2-apt-source.deb "https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/ros-apt-source/releases/download/${ROS_APT_SOURCE_VERSION}/ros2-apt-source_${ROS_APT_SOURCE_VERSION}.$(. /etc/os-release && echo ${UBUNTU_CODENAME:-${VERSION_CODENAME}})_all.deb"

sudo dpkg -i /tmp/ros2-apt-source.deb

rm /tmp/ros2-apt-source.deb

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 ros-humble-rmw-zenoh-cpp

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