pyros-setup 0.1.2

Toolsuite for running ROS environments directly from python code, without any specific requirements outside of usual python

Toolsuite for running ROS environments directly from python code, without any specific requirements outside of usual python.

This is a pure python package, to be installed in your system, in order to allow easy ROS access from your python environment.

HowTo install

To install it:

pip install pyros_setup

To run the self tests, using entry_points defined in setup.py:

pyros_setup

OR using the python package directly:

python -m pyros_setup

OR using nosetests specifically:

nosetests pyros_setup

It can also be used from source inside a catkin workspace in the same way. The workspace act as a virtual environment (using https://github.com/asmodehn/catkin_pip). This is useful for development along with ROS packages:

$ catkin_make
$ source devel/setup.bash
$ python -m pyros_setup
$ pyros_setup
$ nosetests pyros_setup

HowTo code

Basically it allows you to do this:

import pyros_setup
try:
    import rospy
    import roslaunch
    import rosgraph
    import rosnode
except ImportError:  # if ROS environment is not setup, we emulate it.
    pyros_setup.configurable_import().configure('mysetup.cfg').activate()  # this will use mysetup.cfg from pyros-setup instance folder
    import rospy
    import roslaunch
    import rosgraph
    import rosnode

With mysetup.cfg in pyros-setup instance folder containing:

import os
WORKSPACES=[os.path.join('home', 'user', 'ROS', 'workspace', 'devel')]
DISTRO='indigo'

Note: If you know any easier / less tricky / more pythonic way of handling configurable dynamic imports, let me know!

HowTo deploy

If you want to use pyros-setup, you should use the pip package, since the whole point is to provide access to ROS from pure python environment. This is now possible thanks to [catkin_pip](https://github.com/asmodehn/catkin_pip)

Remarks

Although it would technically be possible to build a ROS package from this source, this will NOT be done. The catkin build system is only here to help having pyros-setup in a source workspace while developing on it. When using ROS directly this package is not needed, and having it installed among ROS packages would cause much user confusion when importing packages.