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ros-industrial/industrial_ci — Easy CI for ROS Repositories

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Summary

industrial_ci is a reusable CI library maintained by the ROS-Industrial consortium. Any ROS/ROS2 package can adopt it with a single uses: ros-industrial/industrial_ci@master line in a GitHub Actions workflow. It runs entirely inside Docker, uses colcon (ROS2) or catkin_tools (ROS1) to build the workspace, runs all registered tests, and optionally applies static analysis (clang-tidy, clang-format, pylint, black) and ABI compatibility checks.

industrial_ci 是 ROS-Industrial 社群維護的可重用 CI 函式庫。任何 ROS/ROS2 套件只需在 GitHub Actions 工作流程中加入一行 uses: ros-industrial/industrial_ci@master 即可採用。它在 Docker 內執行，以 colcon（ROS2）或 catkin_tools（ROS1）建置工作區，執行所有已定義的測試，並可選擇性地進行靜態分析（clang-tidy、clang-format、pylint、black）及 ABI 相容性檢查。

Key Points

  • Zero boilerplate CI: One uses: line gives you a complete build-test-lint pipeline with no shell scripting
  • Docker-based isolation: CI runs in official ROS Docker images; you can override with DOCKER_IMAGE for custom environments
  • Multi-distro matrix: Use GitHub Actions matrix strategy with ROS_DISTRO to test against multiple ROS versions in one push
  • Workspace dependency management: UPSTREAM_WORKSPACE and DOWNSTREAM_WORKSPACE allow testing packages with their full dependency tree, even across repos
  • Code quality gates: CLANG_FORMAT_CHECK, CLANG_TIDY, PYLINT_CHECK, BLACK_CHECK turn linting into hard CI failures
  • ABI check: ABICHECK_URL enables backward-compatibility verification — useful for library maintainers
  • Prerelease testing: PRERELEASE=true runs the official ROS prerelease test suite inside Docker

Insights

The core value proposition is standardization: instead of each ROS package author writing their own CI YAML, they inherit a tested, community-maintained pipeline. This is especially useful for the ROS-Industrial ecosystem where packages must stay compatible across distros. The UPSTREAM_WORKSPACE mechanism solves a real ROS pain point — packages often have non-released dependencies that need to be built from source before the target package can compile.

The Docker-in-CI architecture means the build environment exactly matches a vanilla ROS install, avoiding “works on my machine” divergence. The CCACHE_DIR variable is critical for keeping CI times under control when rebuilding large C++ workspaces.

Connections

Raw Excerpt

This package contains CI scripts that any ROS-powered packages can commonly use. Main CI processes of industrial_ci run on Docker.

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