Beginner's Guide: How to Set Up ROS2 Humble

Ready to dive into robotics? This guide will take you through the basics of setting up ROS 2 Humble on your system. If you already know what ROS is and need help getting it set up, you’re in the right place to start building and experimenting right away.

Prerequisites:

Before we get started, make sure your system meets these requirements:

You’re running Ubuntu 22.04 and have Python installed

Lets get started:

If you’re cool with trusting a random stranger from the internet, just open a terminal (ctrl + alt + t) and run my script—it’ll take care of everything for you. Or, if you like, you can follow the step-by-step instructions.

# RUN THESE ONE BY ONE
sudo apt install -y curl
curl -OL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nandu-k01/scripts/main/setup_system.sh
chmod +x setup_system.sh
./setup_system.sh

So you don’t trust the stranger on the internet, It’s always a good idea, and I totally agree. Well please follow the steps, Let’s update the system packages first. Open a terminal and start copying and pasting.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Next, let’s set up the locale. This means making sure your system uses a consistent character encoding, in this case, en_us.UTF-8 .

sudo apt install locales
sudo locale-gen en_US en_US.UTF-8
sudo update-locale LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Next, let’s add the ROS repository to your system so apt can find the packages. Also, enable the Ubuntu Universe repository. Run these commands one by one:

sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo apt update && sudo apt install curl -y
sudo curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/ros.asc | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/ros-archive-keyring.gpg] http://packages.ros.org/ros2/ubuntu $(. /etc/os-release && echo $UBUNTU_CODENAME) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros2.list > /dev/null

Now, let’s go ahead and install everything with apt. Make sure to update the repositories and upgrade the packages again.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

I recommend installing the full version of ROS Humble, so here’s the command for you all:

sudo apt install ros-humble-desktop && sudo apt install ros-dev-tools

You need to source the ROS 2 setup script to set up your environment. Instead of doing this manually every time, let’s add it to your .bashrc file. This way, the ROS environment will be ready to go whenever you open a new terminal session.

Note: The .bashrc file runs commands automatically whenever you open a terminal. This lets you set up environment variables, customize your terminal prompt, add paths, or define aliases.

echo 'source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash' >> ~/.bashrc

And that’s it! Open a new terminal or run source ~/.bashrc in your current one. Then type ros --version to check if you’ve successfully installed ROS 2.

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or nandagopan.k01@gmail.com.