catch_ros2

catch_ros2 is an open source ROS 2 package that I developed as part of my work on the omnid mocobots. It fills a gap in the ROS 2 ecosystem for a C++ testing framework that allows simple setup of both unit testing (for library classes, functions, etc.) and integration testing (for testing the interactions between ROS nodes).

Catch2 is a very simple and easy to use C++ testing framework. At the time of this work, Ubuntu 22.04 (the LTS Linux distro ROS 2 uses) only provides Catch v1 and Catch2 v2 - not the most updated version, Catch2 v3. The catch_ros2 package vendors Catch2 v3 so the most updated version can be used for testing in ROS 2 projects.

ROS 2 already contains a framework for writing integration tests in Python which may be more than sufficient for most users. GTest can also be used to test C++ code within an integration test. However, to my knowledge, I have not seen an easy way to create integration tests in C++ with Catch2. The catch_ros2 package aims to fill that gap.

This package is available for ROS 2 Humble, Iron, and Rolling as Debian packages. Head over to the linked ROS index pages for links to the source repository (which has documentation) and see if this package could help your project!