ROS Deploy Overview

What the ROS 2 deployment system is and how to use it.

ROS Deploy Overview

ros-deploy is the Ansible project that installs and configures ROS 2 (Robot Operating System) across the whole League Robotics fleet — physical robots, Raspberry Pis, Ubuntu VMs, and Docker containers. One set of playbooks brings every node to the same known-good state, so adding or rebuilding a robot is repeatable instead of hand-crafted.

What it does

Installs ROS 2 (Humble on Ubuntu 22.04, Kilted on Ubuntu 24.04) at the ros-base or desktop variant.
Puts every node on a shared DDS domain (ros_domain_id: 42) so nodes discover each other automatically over the LAN.
Provisions optional capabilities per host: cameras, joystick publishing, a rosbridge WebSocket gateway, X11 forwarding, Docker, and a heartbeat check.
Manages the ansible service account and all SSH keys / secrets through dotconfig (SOPS-encrypted), so credentials never live in the repo in plaintext.

How it’s organized

Path	Purpose
`inventory/hosts.ini`	The fleet — host IPs and group membership. Edit this to describe the network.
`playbooks/`	One playbook per job (`site.yml` runs everything; `ros_install.yml`, `cameras.yml`, `joy.yml`, etc. run one piece).
`roles/`	The reusable units the playbooks apply (`ros`, `cameras`, `joy`, `rosbridge`, `common`, …).
`inventory/group_vars` / `host_vars`	Configuration: defaults for all hosts, plus per-host overrides.
`config/`	dotconfig tree — encrypted `ansible` SSH key and secrets.

Using it: the short version

# 1. Load the service SSH key for this session (decrypts into config/files/)
dotconfig key load ansible

# 2. Deploy everything to every host in the inventory
ansible-playbook playbooks/site.yml

# ...or just one host
ansible-playbook playbooks/site.yml --limit <hostname>

# ...or just one capability
ansible-playbook playbooks/cameras.yml --limit <hostname>

Re-running is always safe — every task is idempotent, so applying a playbook to an already-configured host changes nothing.

Where to go next

Setting Up a New Node — bootstrap and deploy a brand-new robot.
ROS Packages & Capabilities — what the fleet actually provides.
Fleet Administration — distributing packages and config across the network.

Full reference docs live in the repo’s README and the agent guide AGENTS.md.