catkin

ROS 1's official build system, using CMake to compile and manage packages in a workspace.

catkin is ROS 1's official build system, extended from CMake; it compiles the packages under a workspace's src directory in dependency order and produces the build and devel directories along with environment scripts (source devel/setup.bash) that let the system find those packages. Two commands are commonly used: catkin_make, which comes with ROS and compiles all packages as a single CMake project, and catkin build, from catkin_tools, which builds each package in isolation and makes errors easier to trace back to their source. By ROS 2, catkin had been replaced by ament and colcon. Noetic, ROS 1's final distribution, reached end of maintenance in 2025, but a large amount of legacy code and tutorial material still uses catkin, so it's still something you run into when reading older projects.

ExampleRun mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src, put packages into src, run catkin_make from within catkin_ws, then source devel/setup.bash.

Also called

catkin_make, catkin build

Related

Robot Operating System · ament · colcon · ROS Workspace · Package (ROS) · CMake

Sources

ROS Wiki: catkin
catkin_tools documentation

As of

2025-05