Announcing Gazebo Rotary

Gazebo Gazebo Announcements and News
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Hello Gazebo Community,

The Gazebo team is happy to announce the availability of Gazebo Rotary, a new bleeding-edge release of Gazebo built nightly from the main branches of every constituent library. You can learn more details at the Gazebo Rotary Documentation Page. We’re introducing this new Gazebo release to improve our development velocity and simplify the process of making long and short term support Gazebo releases. This model has been used successfully by the ROS project (among others) for a number of years now, and we would like to import that process model to the Gazebo team’s development workflow.

Under Gazebo’s new development policy, all active development now happens directly on the main branches of the constituent libraries, with changes backported to older stable releases where possible. Gazebo Rotary is the direct manifestation of this policy. It is primarily intended for core developers of Gazebo, community contributors, and developers building Gazebo-related packages or plugins intended for eventual release to end-users. If you are an end-user building a robot simulation or running Gazebo in production, you should stick with an active stable release unless you are an advanced user who explicitly needs to test against the nightly main development branch.

Because binaries are built automatically nightly from active development branches, packages may occasionally break or introduce regressions. As such, the Rotary release is not recommended for production environments as we make no guarantees on how long it may take to fix issues introduced during the development process.

In terms of coexistence, Gazebo Rotary can be installed alongside older stable releases (such as Gazebo Harmonic or Gazebo Ionic). However, starting with Gazebo Jetty, side-by-side installation is no longer supported; installing Gazebo Rotary will conflict with and replace any Gazebo Jetty installation on your machine.

Platform Support & Installation

Ubuntu Linux (Noble 24.04 & Resolute 26.04)

Nightly Debian packages are currently available for Ubuntu Noble (24.04) and Ubuntu Resolute (26.04).

[!NOTE] Support for Ubuntu Noble (24.04) will likely be dropped soon. Additionally, because Gazebo Rotary is a rolling and ever-changing release, target Ubuntu distributions will roll forward over time as new versions are released.

  • Metapackage: You can install the entire suite using the metapackage:
sudo apt install gz-rotary
  • Package Naming & Aliases: Packages use unversioned names (e.g., libgz-sensors-dev) and also include aliases with a rotary substring (e.g., libgz-rotary-sensors-dev) to ensure clarity.
  • Repository Setup: To configure the nightly package repository on your system, please refer to the brief setup instructions in the Gazebo Rotary Installation Documentation.

The Gazebo Open Container Images have also been updated to include Rotary for amd64 architectures. If you have rocker installed, you can get started quickly by running:

rocker --x11 --nvidia gpus ghcr.io/openrobotics/gazebo:rotary-full -- gz sim --verbose

Instructions for using the images with other tools, such as Docker, is provided in https://github.com/openrobotics/gz_oci_images

macOS

Homebrew formulae are available through the official OSRF tap. Note that these formulae build from source.

  1. Tap the repository:
brew tap osrf/simulation
  1. Install the metapackage:
brew install gz-rotary

Windows

Windows binaries are not provided nightly. To use Gazebo Rotary on Windows, you must build it from source.

ROS Integration

We are actively working on ROS integration for Gazebo Rotary, with the goal of pairing it with ROS 2 Rolling. You can track our progress and contribute to the discussion in gazebo-tooling/release-tools#1475.

A big thank you to @scpeters and @j-rivero who made this release possible!

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