CI status

Introduction

CCWS is a development environment for ROS, which integrates functionality of traditional catkin workspaces and CI pipelines in order to facilitate (cross-)compilation, testing, linting, documetation and binary package generation. It is intended to be used both as a CI/CD backbone and a working environment for developers. Note that CCWS is not intended to be a complete solution, but rather a basis for development of a vendor-specific workflow.

CCWS is ROS version agnostic, and should work in most cases for both ROS1 and ROS2.

Features

• Build profiles – sets of configurations for build process, e.g., cmake toolchain, colcon configuration, environment variables, etc. Profiles do not conflict with each other and can be used in parallel without using separate clones of the workspace and packages.

• Execution profiles – simple shell mixins that are intended to modify run time environment, e.g., execute nodes in valgrind, alter node crash handling, etc.

• A number of features implemented via build profiles:

  • Cross compilation to several common platforms.

  • Documentation generation for the whole workspace or selected packages using doxygen, similar to https://github.com/mikepurvis/catkin_tools_document.

  • Linting with clang-tidy and scan_build.

  • Various static checks as in https://github.com/sscpac/statick, in particular:
    • cppcheck
    • catkin_lint https://github.com/fkie/catkin_lint
    • yamllint
    • shellcheck
  • Binary debian package generation.

• Package template which demonstrates how to use some of the features.

• The number of parallel jobs can be selected based on available RAM instead of CPU cores, since RAM is likely to be the limiting factor.

• Based entirely on make and shell scripts. All scripts and configurations are kept in the workspace and easy to adjust for specific needs.

Build profiles

Profile configurations are located in ccws/profiles/build, common subdirectory contains default parameters, which can be overriden by specific profiles:

• [default] reldebug – default compiler, cmake build type is RelWithDebInfo
• scan_build – compile with clang using scan_build and clang-tidy for static checks. clang-tidy parameters are defined in cmake toolchain and must be enabled in packages as shown in package template CMakeLists.
• clang_tidy – a simplified version of scan_build without clang and scan_build.
• thread_sanitizer – compilation with thread sanitizer.
• addr_undef_sanitizers – compilation with address and undefined behavior sanitizers.
• static_checks – static checkers and their configuration.
• doxygen – doxygen and its configuration.
• cross_raspberry_pi – cross-compilation for Raspberry Pi.
• cross_jetson_xavier – cross-compilation for Jetson Xavier.
• cross_jetson_nano – cross-compilation for Jetson Nano.
• clangd – collects compilation commands from another profile and generates clangd configuration file in the workspace root.
• deb – debian package generation (see below).

Execution profiles

Execution profiles set environment variables that can be used in launch scripts to alter run time behavior as demonstrated in ccws/pkg_template/catkin/launch/bringup.launch, currently available profiles are:

• common – a set of common ROS parameters, e.g., ROS_HOME, it is automatically included in binary packages.
• test – sets CCWS_NODE_CRASH_ACTION variable so that nodes that respect it become required, i.e., termination of such nodes would result in crash of test scripts and can thus be easily detected.
• valgrind – sets CCWS_NODE_LAUNCH_PREFIX to valgrind and some variables that control behavior of valgrind.
• core_pattern – sets core pattern to save core files in the artifacts directory.
• address_sanitizer – helper for addr_undef_sanitizers profile.

Execution profiles have no effect on build process and are taken into account in *test* targets or debian packages. test execution profile is always used in tests and additional profiles can be provided with `EXEC_PROFILE=”