Conan - Colcon Example

This is a basic example of consuming a conan library package in a ROS 2 package.

Create the hello conan package

conan create hello_conan_lib

Build the ROS 2 package

Install the conan dependencies of the ros2 package(s)

conan install ros2 --output-folder=build --build=missing

Build colcon package hello_ros

colcon build --base-paths ros2 --cmake-args -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=$PWD/build/conan_toolchain.cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

Run the executable

./build/hello_ros/hello_ros

Project Structure

• hello_conan_lib : library that can be packaged with conan
• ros2 : base of ros2 packages, note the --base-paths ros arg passed to colcon
• ros2/conanfile.txt : conan file describing the dependencies needed by ROS 2 packages to build

Tooling

We need to pass the CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE argument to colcon to enable it to find the conan packages durring the build.