Run ROS2 inside of VSCode's remote development

ROS2 in vscode

This tutorial is based on Run ROS2 inside of VSCode's remote development by William Guimont-Martin.

Create a Dockerfile with the following content in your project:

FROM osrf/ros:iron-desktop-full

Create .devcontainer/devcontainer.json with the following content in your project:

{
	"name": "ros2",
	"build": {
		"context": "..",
		"dockerfile": "../Dockerfile"
	},
	"customizations": {
		"vscode": {
			"extensions": [
				"ms-python.python"
			]
		}
	},
	"mounts": [
		"source=/tmp/.X11-unix,target=/tmp/.X11-unix,type=bind",
		"source=/dev/shm,target=/dev/shm,type=bind"
	],
	"containerEnv": {
		"DISPLAY": ":1",
		"NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES": "all",
		"NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES": "all"
	},
	"runArgs": [
		"--ipc=host",
		"--pid=host",
		"--net=host"
	],
	"postCreateCommand": "echo \"source /opt/ros/$ROS_DISTRO/setup.bash\" >> ~/.bashrc"
}

To allow the container to run GUI applications (e.g., rviz2), you need to run the following command:

# Allow xhost access to local user
xhost +si:localuser:root

In VSCode, install the extension pack Remote Development that allows remote development inside of Docker containers.

Open your project in VSCode, and start remote development by entering Dev Containers: Rebuild and Reopen in Container into the command palette (CTRL-SHIFT-P). You can now open a terminal and run your ROS2 nodes:

rosdep install -i --from-path src --rosdistro $ROS_DISTRO -y
colcon build
source install/setup.bash

ros2 launch launch/launch.py

There might me some error in IntelliSense (e.g., some imports not found), run Python: Clear Cache and Reload Window in the command palette.