Run ROS2 in a dockerised environment, which automatically detects the host hardware and selects the runtime accordingly.

System tested

• ✅ Ubuntu 22.04 (amd64/arm64)
• ✅ Ubuntu 24.04 (amd64)
• ✅ Fedora 42 (amd64)

Note: Only Nvidia GPU is supported currently.

Ensure that Docker & Nvidia Container toolkit is installed to use the GPU runtime of the container.

The target distro could be change via the ROS_ENV arguement inside ros_config file.

 ... # === Update config below === ROS_ENV="jazzy" ROS_TYPE="desktop" ...

• ROS_ENV: The ROS distro.
• ROS_TYPE: The type of ROS installation. core consists of the minimum packages to run ROS, whereas desktop_full includes most of the core components, perception and simulation packages.

The workspace directory that is attached to the container is defined in the volumes section inside docker-compose.yml file, which is attached with the following structure: <host_dir>:<container_dir>.

 ... volumes: - ./beluga_ws:/home/user/beluga_ws ...

Enter the docker container via the enter_env script.

cd ~/beluga sudo chmod +x enter_env.sh ./enter_env.sh

If you are using Wayland and/or Fedora, please do not skip this section as RViz2 may crash upon launching the usual way.

To run RViz2 in docker, there are a few additional steps to be taken.

To start Rviz2, export QT_QPA_PLATFORM as xcb, since Rviz2 does not support Wayland.

QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb rviz2

Similarly, export QT_QPA_PLATFORM as xcb before running gazebo. (Reference)

QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb gz sim