Lev Lazinskiy

Vagrant Box for ROS2 on Apple Silicon

I’ve been knee deep in studying robotics ever since joining Foxglove earlier this month. There is so much to learn! One major pain point that I have come across is trying to work with ROS outside of Linux. I have my Framework Laptop running Ubuntu and that is all working without any issues. But my main work computer is an Apple Silicon Macbook Pro and things are complicated.

Apple Silicon has been the best thing to happen to Apple laptops in my lifetime. The performance and battery life are unreal. However it has made working with Linux VMs and compiling stuff for x86 a huge pain. ROS works best on Linux, but Ubuntu is only recently making it easy to install and run ARM based desktop Linux. Before Apple Silicon I remember running Vagrant and Virtualbox without any issues, but ever since switching over to Apple Silicon Virtualbox feels completely unusable to me, especially when it comes to doing basic things that require guest additions.

I have not felt a ton of the pain here because for the last few years Docker has more or less fully taken over the way I run Linux on my Mac. Before this month I don’t remember the last time I used a VM. Most of ROS operates via the command line, and I am using Foxglove for visualization instead of some of the built-in ROS tools. This means that I was able to get very far with just messing around with Docker.

I am working my way through the Foxglove blog and came across this great post by my colleague Jacob which walks you through how to set up image annotations in Foxglove using the dlib library. The post is written for ROS1 and I was able to get everything to work with ROS2, but I ran into a limitation with Docker because as far as I can tell its not possible to access your USB camera from inside of a docker container on Mac.

This is what led me back to VMs and what led me to spend most of my Saturday trying to get Packer, Vagrant, etc working. Its a bit sad to me to see the current state of the Hashicorp stack. I know I am late to that particular party, but you can def feel that they just don’t seem to care about the DX anymore. It’s a shame, but at this point feels like a part of the inevitable enshittification cycle.

I am not really sure how people are running Linux on their Macs these days, but it certainly feels like Vagrant is not a huge part of that picture at the moment because I didn’t see a single arm based ubuntu image out there.

So, as my first official contribution to the robotics community, I put together this little repo and published a few vagrant images to vagrant cloud. These images make it dead simple to get started with running ROS2 via VMWare Fusion on the latest Apple Silicon computers.

• Ubuntu 24.04 LTS arm - basic image with the latest Ubuntu 24.04 LTS desktop ready to go.
• ROS2-Jazzy - an extension of the previous image with everything you need to get ROS2, foxglove, and python working together.

Here is a corresponding Vagrantfile that you can use to get started with a simple vagrant up. If you’re using Foxglove, once the VM is running you can connect via a websocket at 192.168.56.10:8756 and start to visualize your ROS nodes.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "levlaz_org/ros2-jazzy-arm"
  config.vm.hostname = "ros2-dev-playground"

  config.vm.provider "vmware_desktop" do |v|
    v.memory = 8192
    v.cpus = 4
    v.gui = true
  end

  # Network configuration for ROS2
  config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.56.10"
  
  # Shared folder for development
  config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", type: "rsync"

  # Port forwarding for Foxglove bridge (default port 8765)
  config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 8765, host: 8765, id: "foxglove-bridge"
end

I plan to continue to maintain both of these and try to keep up with the latest LTS versions of ROS. I hope someone else finds this useful and removes a bit of toil from getting ROS2 working on your Mac.