A short documentation on how I got ROS2 (Foxy) running on my Apple Silicon (M1)
I started with the binary (x86) version from here . For the installation prerequisites I avoided to go the classical python installation way, because the base installation more or less is read only on the Apple Silicons. Due to that I skipped the following steps
brew install python@3.8 brew link --force python@3.8
Instead I installed Anaconda via the official version from here. After installation all Anaconda programs can found here /opt/anaconda3/. Now start the Anaconda Navigator
/opt/anaconda3/bin/anaconda-navigator
The program somehow looks like the following screenshot.
Below “Environments” create a new environment e.g., named “ros2“. I Propose to use a Python version below 3.8 e.g., 3.7.1. My library setup:
Note: Especially the “matplotlib” und “grapviz” Python libraries are hard to install in Apple Silicon without Anaconda. Many thanks to the Anaconda community for doing the hard work in advance.
Now install the home-brew package manager (short “brew“) as described here. Afterwards proceed with the following lines as of the ROS2 installation guide.
brew install asio tinyxml2 brew install tinyxml eigen pcre poco brew install opencv brew install openssl echo "export OPENSSL_ROOT_DIR=$(brew --prefix openssl)" >> ~/.bashrc brew install qt freetype assimp brew install console_bridge brew install log4cxx spdlog brew install cunit
Now comes the tricky part. It is important to understand that Apple hardened the MacOS with the Apple Silicon OS releases. This includes that the usual (I call it the “Linux”) directly schema is not longer applied e.g., /usr/local/ not contains programs and libraries, if not from x86 architecture. Due to that we have to install “brew” for x86 architecture. For doing so, we require the “Rosetta 2“. Rosetta allows to run x86 stuff on Apple Silicon (ARM).
/usr/sbin/softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license arch -x86_64 /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"
Once the installation is finished we are good to run x86 programs e.g., by adding the command prefix of “arch -x86_64“. In our case the install of the following libraries:
arch -x86_64 /usr/local/Homebrew/bin/brew install tinyxml arch -x86_64 /usr/local/Homebrew/bin/brew install tinyxml2 arch -x86_64 /usr/local/Homebrew/bin/brew install openssl
Now we have to make the library available to the x86 ROS2.
cp /usr/local/Cellar/tinyxml2/9.0.0/lib/libtinyxml2.dylib <where ever you unzipped the ROS2 stuff>/ros2_foxy/ros2-osx/opt/yaml_cpp_vendor/lib/libtinyxml2.8.dylib cp /usr/local/Cellar/openssl\@3/3.0.0_1/lib/libssl.dylib <where ever you unzipped the ROS2 stuff>/ros2_foxy/ros2-osx/opt/yaml_cpp_vendor/lib/libssl.1.1.dylib cp /usr/local/Cellar/openssl\@3/3.0.0_1/lib/libcrypto.dylib <where ever you unzipped the ROS2 stuff>/ros2_foxy/ros2-osx/opt/rviz_ogre_vendor/lib/libcrypto.1.1.dylib
So, we are close to the goal. In a next step we just have to open a terminal, activate our Anaconda environment and source ROS2.
conda activate ros2 bash . <where ever you unzipped the ROS2 stuff>/ros2_foxy/ros2-osx/setup.bash
While running e.g., the “ros2” command you will receive a failure like “/usr/local/bin/python3: bad interpreter: No such file or directory“. To fix this, we just have the adapt the shell script interpreter line from
#!/usr/local/bin/python3
to
#!/opt/anaconda3/envs/ros2/bin/python3
And now we are done 🙂 Enjoy