Spadix, a friendly wrapper for colcon

Copyright 2021-2024 SafeAI

Copyright 2025 Pronto.AI

Why?

Our company uses colcon (from collective construction build manager) as our main build management tool for many years.

While we like this package, it has its problem areas, in our opinion, especially when used by unexperienced engineers.

• Default build is not a merged one, and this disables Doxygen build
• It is allowed to run from any directory in the project tree, making the tree contaminated with build artifacts
• By default console output is switched off and switching it back on requires an additional parameter
• It requires few additional parameters to run gtest alone

We decided to fix these deficiencies and created a wrapper spadix around colcon. Catkin, ament, colcon, spadix... Got it?

How

spadix accepts all colcon commands and options plus it adds and modifies few commands on its own.

Usage:

spadix [Global options] [command] [command options] ...

[Global options]
--no-merge  : Do not use --merge-install option for colcon
--no-console  : Do not use the default console mode: `--event-handlers console_cohesion+`
--no-root-check  : Do not check that spadix being started from the root of a git project
--ninja  : Use Ninja for building when available
--non-ninja  : Do not use Ninja for building, even if it is available

Commands:
clean  :Clean all projects (essentially executes `rm -rf log install build`)
clean:<project1>[,<project2>...]  :Clean selected, comma-separated projects. Spaces not supported

build  :Build all projects using --merge-install settings
build:<project1>[,<project2>...]  Build selected, comma-separated projects. Spaces not supported
    Build options:
        --release   : RelWithDebInfo (debug build by default)
        --no-fif    : Disable Failure Injection Framework (FIF enabled by default)

test  :Test all projects using --merge-install settings
test:<project1>[,<project2>...]  :Test selected, comma separated projects

gtest:<project> [gtest parameters]  :Run gtest only ('build/test_<project name>')