Tricks

One Dockerfile, Development and Release

In your Dockerfile you can make use of multi-stage builds, allowing for one Dockerfile to cover both devleopment and release use cases.

ARG BASE_IMAGE=lcas.lincoln.ac.uk/ros:humble-staging
ARG ROS_DISTRO=humble

FROM ${BASE_IMAGE} AS devcontainer

RUN sudo apt-get install -y cowsay

# Do an initial build to speed up development
RUN /bin/bash -lc "source /opt/ros/${ROS_DISTRO}/setup.bash && source /home/ros/.bashrc && colcon build --continue-on-error"

# ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FROM devcontainer AS final

RUN /bin/bash -lc "source /opt/ros/${ROS_DISTRO}/setup.bash && source /home/ros/.bashrc && colcon build"

CMD ["/bin/bash", "-lc", "source /home/ros/workspace/install/setup.bash && exec ros2 launch my_ros_pkg my_ros_pkg.launch.py"]

Then we can target the devcontainer stage for development, and use the final target for deployment. The last built stage will be what is used by default.