Like the XRCE-DDS Agent before it, now the micro-ROS Agent has been wrapped and delivered as a snap package, too!

Snap is a package manager designed to bundle and handle applications and their dependencies on several Linux distros, like Ubuntu.

We prepared the Agent snap release in collaboration with Canonical. It comes with two ways of running it: as a simple executable or by means of a Linux service.

The first implies the usage of the Agent’s built-in CLI, where the user can specify the standard configuration parameters (such as transport, port…) directly, as follows:

micro-ros-agent <transport> <args>

The second launches the Agent as a Linux service running in the background; to do so, simply execute:

snap set micro-ros-agent daemon=true

In this case, instead of specifying the Agent’s launch parameters via the CLI, users can configure them thanks to the snap services interface, using the snap set micro-ros-agent <param>=<value> command. These parameters’ values are only valid when the daemon option is set to true, while they are ignored in snap run mode.

The full list of configurable parameters can be found here.