ROS Windows 10 Installation

Note: This is a work in progress. I am currently working on a script to automate the installation process.

Note that this guide follows the official installation guide for ROS on windows 10. The guide can be found here.

Prerequisites

In order to succesfully complete this guide, you will need the following:

• Windows 10 (64-bit)
• Visual Studio 2019
• Powershell (installed on the system path)
• Exclude C:\\opt (and later your workspace folder) from real-time virus Scanners, as they can interfere with install and development. (not that this is required, but recommended)
• Clean up and back up data under C:\\opt as it is the required install location. If you don't have this directory then you have nothing to worry about ;)
• Lastly, please have 10GB of free space on your C:\\ hard drive.

Installation

1. Install Visual Studio 2019

This version of Visual Studio 2019 is required to maintain toolchain compatibility with published binaries. You can download the installer here. The community edition is free and works fine.

Make sure to select the following components during installation:

• Include the Desktop development with C++ workload and under Optional include the Windows 10 SDK (10.0.19041.0) component.

  The rest you can leave as default.

2. Install Chocolatey (Package Manager for Windows)

Chocolatey is a package manager for Windows. It allows you to install and update packages from the command line. In this case we needed installed on C:\\opt, so that you can clean or move a ROS environment from that one location.

To install Chocolatey: