Install iCub software from pre-compiled binaries via conda package manager

We provide binary packages for Linux, macOS and Windows of the software contained in the robotology-superbuild via the conda package manager, relying on the community-mantained conda-forge channel and for some packages on on our own robotology conda channel.

Install a conda distribution

If you do not have a conda distribution on your system, we suggest to use the minimal miniforge distribution, that uses conda-forge packages by default.

To install miniforge, please follow the instructions install-miniforge in robotology-superbuild documentation.

Create an environment

Differently from apt and homebrew, the conda package manager is an environment-oriented package manager, meaning that packages are not installed in some global location, but rather you install packages in an environment (that is just a directory in your filesystem), so that you can easily have multiple different environments with different packages installed on your system. To read more about this, check https://docs.conda.io/projects/conda/en/4.6.1/user-guide/tasks/manage-environments.html .

For this reason, to use the robotology conda packages it is suggested to first create a conda environment, and then install in it all the packages you want to use. To create a new environment called robotologyenv, execute the following command:

conda create -n robotologyenv

Once you created the robotologyenv environment, you can "activate" it for the current terminal (i.e. make sure that the installed packages can be found) by the command:

conda activate robotologyenv

Note

IMPORTANT: if you open a new terminal, you need to manually activate the environment also there.

Note

IMPORTANT: To avoid strange conflicts in environment variables, it is a good idea to remove from the environment any variable that refers to libraries or software not installed with conda. For example, if you have a robotology-superbuild installed with apt dependencies, it is a good idea to remove the source of the setup.sh from the .bashrc before using conda environments, or in Windows it can make sense to check with Rapid Environment Editor that the environment is clean.

Note

IMPORTANT: On Windows, it is recommended to use Command Prompt to manage conda environments, as some packages (see conda-forge/gazebo-feedstock#42 and RoboStack/ros-noetic#21) have problems in activating environments on Powershell.

Install robotology packages

Once you are in an activated environment, you can install robotology packages by just running the command:

conda  install -c conda-forge -c robotology <packagename>

Some conda packages of software contained in the robotology-superbuild are contained in the conda-forge channel, while others in robotology channel. When a package is available in both, the conda-forge channel contains the most updated version, so always ensure that the conda-forge channel as an higher priority w.r.t. to the robotology channel.

For example, if you want to install yarp and icub-main, you simple need to install:

conda install -c conda-forge -c robotology yarp icub-main

In addition, if you want to simulate the iCub in Gazebo Classic, you should also install icub-models and gazebo-yarp-plugins:

conda install -c conda-forge -c robotology gazebo-yarp-plugins icub-models

If you want to develop some C++ code on the top of these libraries, it is recommended to also install the necessary compiler and development tools directly in the same environment:

conda install -c conda-forge compilers cmake pkg-config make ninja