ros_d2

Exports ROS2 nodes (publishers, subcribers and services) into a D2 file so they can be visualised and serialised for later use.

Features

• Export runtime ROS2 system architecture (nodes, services, topics, clients) to .d2 (using ros2cli)
• Powerful visualisation and theming provided by D2
• Simple serialisable diagram format
• Ros node descriptions pulled from the package.xml
• Topic QOS descriptions
• Action servers / clients?
• Topic Types (--verbose flag)
• Advanced theming
• Pytest helpers that ensure your ROS2 System architecture matches that of your .d2 diagram
• Better testing on this repo!
• ros_d2 export-launch-files command that will export a .d2 file for each of your launch files
• ros_d2 render command that will render all .d2 files in the current directory

Examples

Simple

More complex applications

Installation

pip install ros-d2
ros_d2 export --help # prints help
# If you get an error about "No module named 'ros2cli'" - ros has not been sourced!

Requirements

• ROS2 + Colcon
• D2

Usage

Exporting a diagram

1. Launch your ROS2 system
2. Source ROS
3. Use ros_d2 to export your runtime ros system to a .d2 file

ros_d2 export ros-diagram.d2

4. Render your diagram using d2.

ros_d2 render # to render ALL .d2 files in the current directory
# or...
d2 --layout dagre ros-diagram.d2 # to use d2 directly

Exporting diagrams for all launch files

If you want to create a .d2 and .svg alongside each of your ros2 .launch.py files. You can use the following script:

# Source ros: eg) `source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash`
# Build your ros2 workspace: eg) `colcon build`
# Source your ros2 workspace: eg) `source install/setup.bash`
ros_d2 export-launch-files
ros_d2 render

Development

Prerequisite

• Python 3.7+
• pre-commit

Installation

following the steps below to setup the project:

```bash
# Clone the repository
git clone git@github.com:Greenroom-Robotics/ros-d2.git && cd ros-d2

# Install all dependencies
pip install -e ./src/ros_d2

Example usage

From the root of this repo:

1. Build this project using colcon

source /opt/ros/galactic/setup.bash
colcon build

ros_d2 --help # prints help

2. Let's bring up the example nodes:

source install/setup.sh
ros2 launch ./src/ros_example_adder_node/launch/example_adder_node.launch.py

3. Now that ROS is running, lets use ros_d2 to generate a diagram of all the nodes in the system:

ros_d2 export example_output/ros-diagram.d2

4. We will now have the example_output/ros-diagram.d2 file. We can render this using d2:

d2 --layout dagre example_output/ros-diagram.d2 example_output/ros-diagram-dagre.svg
# or
d2 --layout elk example_output/ros-diagram.d2 example_output/ros-diagram-dagre.svg
# Note - d2 provides other layouts and themes. See `d2 --help` for more info

This will produce the following diagram:

Dagre:

Elk:

5. We can also export with more info using ros_d2 export example_output/ros-diagram.d2