YARP
Yet Another Robot Platform
Installing YARP on GNU/Linux

Table of Contents

Installation on GNU/Linux

These instructions are for Debian and its derivatives (Ubuntu, etc) GNU/Linux distributions. For other distributions the installation from sources is mostly the same, but you will need to figure out how to install the dependencies on your system.

Install from binaries

Add www.icub.org to your sources.list.

On Ubuntu:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://www.icub.org/ubuntu focal contrib/science" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/icub.list'

(replace focal with the code name of the installed version).

On Debian:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://www.icub.org/debian buster contrib/science" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/icub.list'

(replace buster with the code name of the installed version).

Import the repository public key:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 57A5ACB6110576A6

Update the list of packages and install YARP.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install yarp

You are now ready to check you installation, see Check your installation.

Install from sources

Required Dependencies

Install the following packages to prepare your development environment and get basic dependencies:

sudo apt-get install build-essential git cmake cmake-curses-gui

(Please note that you need some extra step to install CMake 3.12 on Debian 9 and Ubuntu 18.40, see robotology/QA#364

Install YCM from sources or install it from binaries by configuring the icub.org repository (Follow the instructions at Install from binaries), and install it with

sudo apt-get install ycm-cmake-modules

Depending on what parts of YARP you want to enable, you will also have to install some other packages

For convenience's sake, all the required and most optional packages can be installed with this command line, if you want to go into further details about what is installed and why, proceed to the following sections.

sudo apt-get install build-essential git cmake cmake-curses-gui \
ycm-cmake-modules \
libeigen3-dev \
libace-dev \
libedit-dev \
libsqlite3-dev \
libtinyxml-dev \
qtbase5-dev qtdeclarative5-dev qtmultimedia5-dev \
qml-module-qtquick2 qml-module-qtquick-window2 \
qml-module-qtmultimedia qml-module-qtquick-dialogs \
qml-module-qtquick-controls qml-module-qt-labs-folderlistmodel \
qml-module-qt-labs-settings \
libqcustomplot-dev \
libgraphviz-dev \
libjpeg-dev \
libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev \
gstreamer1.0-plugins-base \
gstreamer1.0-plugins-good \
gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad \
gstreamer1.0-libav

Recommended Dependencies

Installing the following packages is recommended:

sudo apt-get install \
libeigen3-dev \
libace-dev \
libedit-dev \
libsqlite3-dev \
libtinyxml-dev

Suggested Dependencies

Qt5

On Debian/Ubuntu the following Qt5 packages are required to build and run YARP GUIs:

sudo apt-get install qtbase5-dev qtdeclarative5-dev qtmultimedia5-dev \
qml-module-qtquick2 qml-module-qtquick-window2 \
qml-module-qtmultimedia qml-module-qtquick-dialogs \
qml-module-qtquick-controls qml-module-qt-labs-folderlistmodel \
qml-module-qt-labs-settings

QCustomPlot

QCustomPlot is also optionally required for yarpscope:

sudo apt-get install libqcustomplot-dev

Graphviz

Graphviz is required for yarpviz

sudo apt-get install libgraphviz-dev

Jpeg Library

The jpeg library is required to build the mjpeg carrier

sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev

GStreamer

GStreamer is required to enable the h264 carrier

sudo apt-get install libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev \
gstreamer1.0-plugins-base \
gstreamer1.0-plugins-good \
gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad \
gstreamer1.0-libav

See also How to install Gstreamer

Compiling YARP

To get the source you can download the latest release at https://github.com/robotology/yarp/releases/ or clone YARP git repository from one of the following addresses:

For example:

git clone https://github.com/robotology/yarp.git

By default the master (development) branch is cloned, if you need a stable branches they are named yarp-<version>. For example

git clone -b yarp-3.3 https://github.com/robotology/yarp.git

Generate makefiles using CMake:

cd yarp
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..

Usually you want to check in the CMake output that "Compile GUIs" and "Compile YARP_math library" are enabled, if they are not, you are probably missing some dependency.

Compile:

make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

You are now ready to check you installation, see Check your installation.

Remarks
YARP is installed with the RPATH enabled. This allows to install YARP in another location by changing the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX option (default is /usr/local). If you install YARP in a system directories, or if you use the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable, you might want to disable the RPATH. In order to do this, you have to enable the CMAKE_SKIP_INSTALL_RPATH option in cmake.
If YARP is not installed in a system location, you you will have to set the YARP_DIR and YARP_DATA_DIRS environment variables to point to the installation directory, see Setup your environment.
Do not select other options unless you know what you are doing.

Setup your environment

If you have installed YARP in default location you can skip to Check your installation.

If you are using YARP without installing it or you have installed it in a custom location, or you have disabled RPATH, you have to tweak your environment (edit your ~/.bashrc or similar) to:

  • Set environment variables YARP_DIR to the location where you installed YARP (or CMake's build directory if you did not perform the installation step) to allow cmake to find YARP easily for your own projects. Set YARP_DATA_DIRS to $YARP_DIR/share/yarp.
  • Add YARP_DIR/bin to PATH to allow your shell to find YARP programs.
  • Add YARP_DIR/lib to LD_LIBRARY_PATH to allow YARP programs to find YARP libraries, if you enabled CMAKE_SKIP_INSTALL_RPATH and did not install in a system directory.