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Deprecated Installation Methods

This documentation page contains some deprecated installation methods, that while working fine at the moment, may be discontinued in the future.

Table of Contents

Binary Installation

Windows from binary installer generated with vcpkg dependencies

Any release of robotology-superbuild comes with Windows binaries, that can be downloaded from the GitHub's release page of that release.

Each release contains two installers:

  • robotology-dependencies-installer-win64.exe that installs a custom vcpkg installation in C:/robotology/vcpkg for compile from source the robotology software
  • robotology-full-installer-win64.exe that also installs the software built by the robotology-superbuild in C:/robotology/robotology.

In both cases, the installer offer an options to create and append all the necessary user environment variables to use the C++ libraries and the binaries without any further configuration. Note that you may want to opt out from this if in your system you also use other kind of C++ libraries system to avoid conflicts, and instead manually invoke the following scripts to setup the environments as necessary:

  • C:/robotology/scripts/setup.bat : Batch script to set the environment variables in a Command Prompt terminal.
  • C:/robotology/scripts/setup.sh : Bash script to set the environment variables in a Git for Windows bash terminal, that can be included in the .bash_profile.
  • C:/robotology/scripts/addPathsToUserEnvVariables.ps1 : Powershell scripts to permanently add or remove the environment variables in the User Environment Variables. This is the script that is executed by the installer when the option "Update Environment Variables" is selected. The environment can be cleaned by any environment variable added by addPathsToUserEnvVariables.ps1 by executing the script removePathsToUserEnvVariables.ps1.

Furthermore, if you do not have Visual Studio 2019 installed on your machine, the installer requires the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and 2019 to be installed on your machine, that can be downloaded at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads, in particular you need to install the file https://aka.ms/vs/16/release/vc_redist.x64.exe .

Source Installation

Clone the repo

The first step to install robotology-superbuild from source is to download the robotology-superbuild code itself, and this is done through Git.

Once you install Git, you need to set your name and email to sign your commits, as this is required by the superbuild:

git config --global user.name FirstName LastName
git config --global user.email [email protected]

Once git is configured, you can open a command line terminal. If you want to use the robotology-superbuild in rolling update mode, just clone the superbuild:

git clone https://github.com/robotology/robotology-superbuild

this will clone the superbuild in its default branch.

You can download and use the robotology-superbuild anywhere on your system, but if you are installing it on an iCub robot laptop following the official iCub instructions, you should clone it in the /usr/local/src/robot directory.

If instead you want to use a specific release of the robotology superbuild, after you clone switch to use to a specific release tag:

git checkout v<YYYY.MM>

For the list of actually available tags, see the GitHub's releases page.

Once you cloned the repo, to go forward you can follow the different deprecated instructions on how to install robotology-superbuild from the source code, depending on your operating system:

When compiled from source, robotology-superbuild will download and build a number of software. For each project, the repository will be downloaded in the src/<package_name> subdirectory of the superbuild root. The build directory for a given project will be instead the src/<package_name> subdirectory of the superbuild build directory. All the software packages are installed using the install directory of the build as installation prefix.

macOS from source using Homebrew dependencies

System Dependencies

To install the system dependencies, it is possible to use Homebrew:

brew install ace assimp bash-completion boost cmake eigen gsl ipopt jpeg libedit nlohmann-json opencv pkg-config portaudio qt@5 sqlite swig tinyxml libmatio irrlicht spdlog

Since Qt5 is not symlinked in /usr/local by default in the homebrew formula, Qt5_DIR needs to be properly set to make sure that CMake-based projects are able to find Qt5.

export Qt5_DIR=/usr/local/opt/qt5/lib/cmake/Qt5

If you want to enable a profile or a dependency specific CMake option, you may need to install additional system dependencies following the dependency-specific documentation (in particular, the ROBOTOLOGY_USES_GAZEBO option is enabled by default, so you should install Gazebo unless you plan to disable this option):

Superbuild

cd robotology-superbuild
mkdir build
cd build

To use GNU Makefile generators:

cmake ../
make

To use Xcode project generators

cmake ../ -G Xcode
xcodebuild [-configuration Release|Debug] [-jobs <n>] [-list | -target <target_name>]

-list gives the list of available targets.

Note: as of late 2020, the Xcode 12 generator is not supported, for more info see robotology/ycm-cmake-modules#368. All previous versions instead should work fine. If you have Xcode 12 installed in your macOS system, please use the GNU Makefiles generator.

Configure your environment

The superbuild provides an automatically generated setup.sh sh script that will set all the necessary enviromental variables to use the software installed in the robotology-superbuild. To do so automatically for any new terminal that you open, append the following line to the .bash_profile file:

source <directory-where-you-downloaded-robotology-superbuild>/build/install/share/robotology-superbuild/setup.sh

To use the updated .bash_profile in your terminal you should run the following command:

user@host:~$ source ~/.bash_profile

or simply open a new terminal.

If for any reason you do not want to use the provided setup.sh script and you want to manage your enviroment variables manually, please refer to the documentation available at doc/environment-variables-configuration.md .

Windows from source using vcpkg dependencies

System Dependencies

As Windows does not have a widely used system package manager such as the one that are available on Linux or macOS, installing the system dependencies is slightly more complicated. However, we try to document every step necessary for the installation, but if you find something that you don't understand in the documentation, please open an issue.

Visual Studio

Most of the robotology software is developed using the C/C++ language. For this reason, you should have Visual Studio, the official Microsoft compiler for Windows, installed on your computer to compile the software in the superbuild. Only Visual Studio 2019 targeting the 64 bit platform is currently supported by the robotology-superbuild. Pay attention to enable the C++ support (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/vscpp-step-0-installation) when first installing the Visual Studio compiler, as by default C++ support is not installed.

Git

Most of the robotology software is hosted on Git repositories, so you will need Git to download them. You can download the Git installer at http://msysgit.github.io/ .

CMake

To install CMake you can use the official installer available at http://www.cmake.org/cmake/resources/software.html . It is recommended to install the latest version of CMake.

Rapid Enviroment Editor

While this tool is not strictly required, it is convenient to install the Rapid Environment Editor to easily modify the value of the environment variables in Windows.

System Libraries

The software in the superbuild depends on several C++ libraries: to install the required dependencies on your machine, we suggest to use vcpkg, the C++ library manager mantained by Microsoft. As vcpkg compiles from sources all its libraries, this can be quite time intensive for some libraries such as qt5 or opencv.

For this reason, we provide a ready to use vcpkg workspace at https://github.com/robotology/robotology-superbuild-dependencies-vcpkg/releases, that you can download and unzip in C:/ and use directly from there, for example executing the following commands from the Git Bash shell:

cd C:/
wget https://github.com/robotology/robotology-superbuild-dependencies-vcpkg/releases/latest/download/vcpkg-robotology.zip
unzip vcpkg-robotology.zip -d C:/
rm vcpkg-robotology.zip

or creating the directories and extracting the archive through the File Explorer. If you prefer to use your own vcpkg to install the dependencies of the superbuild, please refer to the documentation available at doc/vcpkg-dependencies.md.

If you want to enable the ROBOTOLOGY_USES_GAZEBO option, you will need to download and extract the vcpkg-robotology-with-gazebo.zip archive. For instructions on how to correctly use this archives, please refer to documentation of the robotology-superbuild-dependencies-vcpkg repo.

If you want to enable a profile or a dependency specific CMake option, you may need to install additional system dependencies following the dependency-specific documentation:

Superbuild

Once you cloned the repository, you can generate the Visual Studio solution using the CMake GUI, by using as a generator the appropriate Visual Studio version, and the 64 bit as platform, and specifying the vcpkg CMake toolchain as discussed in the previous section. In particular, see the nicely written CGold documentation if you do not know how to generate a Visual Studio solution from a CMake project.

You can then open the generated solution with Visual Studio and build the target all.

Visual Studio will then download, build and install in a local directory all the robotology software and its dependencies. If you prefer to work from the command line, you can also compile the all target using the following command (if you are in the robotology-superbuild/build directory, and the directory of the cmake.exe exectuable is in the PATH :

cmake --build . --config Release

Configure your environment

If you are an heavy user of the software installed by the robotology-superbuild, you may want to update your user enviroment variables to permit you to use the robotology-superbuild software from any Windows process. To automatically update the user enviroment variables, the robotology-superbuild provides the addPathsToUserEnvVariables.ps1 and removePathsFromUserEnvVariables.ps1 available at <directory-where-you-downloaded-robotology-superbuild>/build/install/share/robotology-superbuild/. As indicated by their name, addPathsToUserEnvVariables.ps1 is used to setup the enviroment variables used by the robotology-superbuild, while removePathsFromUserEnvVariables.ps1 permits to cleanly remove them. To configure the robotology-superbuild, just run the addPathsToUserEnvVariables.ps1 script once in a Powershell terminal.

To check the values of the enviroment variables modified by the powershell scripts provided by the superbuild, you can use a program such as Rapid Enviroment Editor.

If you do not want to modify the user enviroment variables permanently, the superbuild provides an automatically generated setup.bat batch script in <directory-where-you-downloaded-robotology-superbuild>/build/install/share/robotology-superbuild/setup.bat. This script will set all the necessary enviromental variables to use the software installed by the robotology-superbuild. However, as in Windows there is no .bashrc file-equivalent, you will need to call this script every time you open a batch terminal in which you want to run the software installed by the robotology-superbuild.

Another option if you do not want to to modify the user enviroment variables permanently and you use the Git Bash as your main terminal, is to use the automatically generated setup.sh script, available in <directory-where-you-downloaded-robotology-superbuild>/build/install/share/robotology-superbuild/setup.sh. You can source automatically this script for any new Git Bash instance by creating a .bash_profile file in your C:/Users/<UserName> directory, and by adding in it the file:

source <directory-where-you-downloaded-robotology-superbuild>/build/install/share/robotology-superbuild/setup.sh

If for any reason you do not want to use the provided scripts and you want to manage your enviroment variables manually, for example because you want to cleanup the enviroment variables modified by addPathsToUserEnvVariables.ps1 and you delete the corresponding removePathsFromUserEnvVariables.ps1, please refer to the documentation available at doc/environment-variables-configuration.md .

If you have problems in Windows in launching executables or using libraries installed by superbuild, it is possible that due to some existing software on your machine your executables are not loading the correct dll for some of the dependencies. This is the so-called DLL Hell, and for example it can happen if you are using the Anaconda Python distribution on your Windows installation. To troubleshoot this kind of problems, you can open the library or executable that is not working correctly using the Dependencies software. This software will show you which DLL your executable or library is loading. If you have any issue of this kind and need help, feel free to open an issue in our issue tracker.