ros-tooling/setup-ros

Colcon not found after setup-ros

Closed this issue · 10 comments

LoyVanBeek commented

Description

For some reason, the colcon is not found after the setup-ros action

Expected Behavior

colcon is found and can be used to compile and run tests with`

Actual Behavior

I get the error: colcon: command not found
As seen in:

To Reproduce

Nothing special, just the canonical, simplest use of setup-ros, as used in eg. https://github.com/LoyVanBeek/telegram_ros2/actions/runs/64102949/workflow

System (please complete the following information)

  • OS: Ubuntu 18.04 on GitHub Actions
  • ROS 2 Distro: Eloquent

Additional context

I'm new to ROS2 and GitHub actions, just trying to learn.

piraka9011 commented

Can you try this with the latest version of setup-ros (0.0.15) and action-ros-ci (0.0.14)

LoyVanBeek commented

I've tried a few different versions, but in another commit I copied the workflow YAML from https://github.com/ros2/rosbag2/blob/master/.github/workflows/test.yml.
This does work for me, somehow.

The main difference is that I originally had a line '- uses: actions/checkout@v2`.

That change still doesn't make my build succeed but at least there is now Colcon to tell me that (package is not yet finished so some failures expected).

piraka9011 commented

This may be an issue with the checkout overwriting the directory for some reason. It's not 100% clear to me how these actions maintain state from one step to another (yet).
I will keep this open for tracking to see whether this is indeed a conflict between checkout and the setup-ros/action-ros-ci actions.

aprotyas commented

Just bumping this thread to report the same thing on a small demo I'm doing too. The workflow ran without errors right before the commit where I added - uses:actions/checkout to the workflow definition. Here's the log.

EDIT:
I went through the console output for the step in ros-tooling/setup-ros where colcon is installed using pip, and the warning of interest is: WARNING: The script colcon is installed in '/usr/lib/example_package' which is not on PATH. Similarly, pip itself is also installed in /usr/lib/example_package, and not in /usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages (check this section in the workflow log).

I don't know what the fix here is, but it looks like PATH gets altered in some way between actions/checkout and ros-tooling/setup-ros PATH remains consistent, I verified. There must be some other problem here. I will report back with any more information I come across.

Update (07/11):
The problem still persists as long as actions/checkout is allowed to checkout the repository in ${{ GITHUB_WORKSPACE }}. If actions/checkout is provided with a checkout location of ${{ GITHUB_WORKSPACE }}/ros_ws/src, pip is not installed in /usr/lib/example_package. I still don't understand why pip gets installed there, but I think this information may be useful to whoever wants to investigate this matter further.

Update (07/16):
After a little more digging, I can confirm that this problem is exclusive to Python packages that define the install-scripts location in a setup.cfg file. So, all (?) ROS-based Python packages. A stop-gap could be to move to / before invoking pip and then returning with cd -? @piraka9011

  • 👍1
utsavrai commented

Try this -
sudo apt install python3-colcon-common-extensions

  • 👍8
emersonknapp commented

Going to close this as stale - if it remains a problem please reopen.

ijnek commented

Came across this issue when setting up a ROS2 python package.
As explained in #408, it seems that this only happens in python packages with a setup.cfg, as deleting the file made CI pass.

#408 remains a draft. @aprotyas Any plans on continuing the work? Or should someone else continue the work?
Should reopen this one, thanks. @emersonknapp

ijnek commented

The problem still persists as long as actions/checkout is allowed to checkout the repository in ${{ GITHUB_WORKSPACE }}. If actions/checkout is provided with a checkout location of ${{ GITHUB_WORKSPACE }}/ros_ws/src, pip is not installed in /usr/lib/example_package. I still don't understand why pip gets installed there, but I think this information may be useful to whoever wants to investigate this matter further.

A work around for this issue could be to update the instructions in action-ros-ci's README to specify a path when using actions/checkout, such as:

- uses: actions/checkout@v2
  with:
    path: tmp

such that the setup.cfg gets placed into the ${{ GITHUB_WORKSPACE }}/tmp rather than ${{ GITHUB_WORKSPACE }}.

action-ros-ci's vcs-repo-file-url can then be updated with something like below:

- uses: ros-tooling/action-ros-ci@v0.2
  with:
    target-ros2-distro: rolling
    vcs-repo-file-url: tmp/deps.repos
christophebedard commented

Given that:

  • we need to be able to get .repos files from the repo itself, somehow
  • we would prefer not to need extra inputs for actions/checkout
    • so no path: tmp
  • some workflows probably use vcs-repo-file-url: "${{ github.workspace }}/path/to/file.repos" (I know the setup-ros tests do)
  • making the given vcs-repo-file-url path relative to the vcs imported repo (instead of the one checked out using actions/checkout) and not relying on users using actions/checkout is not optimal, since people might want to generate a .repos file before action-ros-ci is run

..a solution like #408, where we run pip install ... in a different directory, is probably best. It sounds like #408 doesn't work, but I tried doing it slightly differently and it seems to work: #466. If other people could confirm that it works for their workflows, that would be great!

  • 👍1
christophebedard commented

This should now be fixed with ros-tooling/setup-ros@v0.2, @0.2.2, or @master.