For ROS2 support please see: ros2-mac-osx.
Developing on Mac OSX with ROS locally built for the past 6+ years has been nice, especially with the support scripts from ros-install-osx. Unfortunately, recently several brew commands are either failing or no longer supported to a point where building ROS on a Mac is not only frustrating, but extremely time consuming. The purpose of this repository is to hold a working copy of the libraries that has successfully built ROS on my Mac OSX machine. It's not elegant at all, in fact, it's very "hacky" and might clobber some existing brew packages on your machine. Regardless, I'm putting this together for my future self and the greater ROS community. That being said, I make no guarantees as to whether it will work for you. Good luck!
Notable ROS features that have been tested to work for development,
- ROS1 Kinetic (core, messages, actionlib, services)
- OpenCV (3.3.1)
- PCL (1.8.1)
- Rviz (1.12.13)
- Qt (5.11.1), OGRE (1.9.0)
The following OSX versions have been tested,
- Mac OS: Catalina (10.15.7)
- Mac OS: Sierra (circa 2019)
- Download the
.zipfiles I've conveniently stored on Google Drive, I would advise you do this either via an Ethernet connection (or somewhere with fast WiFi, since the*.zipfiles are about 3GB). - Extract them directly into the desired directories,
unzip ros1-usr-local-with-boost-1-67.zip -d /usr/local/
unzip ros1-kinetic-mac-osx-catalina.zip -d /opt/
You'll need to setup your ~/.bashrc accordingly if you'll like to build your workspace using catkin. Append the following into your ~/.bashrc
export PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/ros/kinetic/lib
export LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1s
source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash
After you've done this, source ~/.bashrc and navigate to your catkin workspace and build like you normally would in Ubuntu using catkin_make. Personally, I like to see the build time and build with clang and ninja as follows,
time catkin_make -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/usr/bin/clang -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/bin/clang++ -j8 --use-ninja;
There seems to be a boost incompatibility with the existing version built in the .zip due to boost 1.67. I was able to fix this locally via forcefully upgrading inside brew to 1.76, although apparently, it reportedly works for 1.69, but I have yet to test this.
brew install boost@1.76
brew link --overwrite boost@1.76