Developer Setup Guide

[rr-tom-noble]

I feel that the Moveit Pull Requests documentation is missing a section on how to easily set up an environment to build and test changes, and set up integration with a forked repository.

For me, the most convenient method has been:

1. Create a fork of moveit2
2. Download the moveit/moveit2:-source Docker Image
3. Start an interactive container with git ssh keys mounted (I usually use the VSCode extension)
4. Source /opt/ros//setup.bash
5. Navigate to /ws_moveit/src/moveit2
6. Set the origin to your fork, checkout / create a new branch
7. Make changes to code
8. Run colcon build --cmake-args -DBUILD_TESTING=ON --packages-up-to
9. Run colcon test --packages-select
10. Check test failures with colcon test-result (I usually grep the output for specific tests -- there might be nicer ways of doing this)
11. Follow the existing guide to format / lint the code
12. Push changes
13. Raise PR from fork

I suppose this process really depends on developer preference, but I definitely found it daunting figuring out how to easily set up an environment when making my first PRs, so I feel like a guide for newcomers might be useful.

I may have also just missed an existing doc page, so this might be redundant. As far as I can see, it mainly relates to code style, running CI jobs locally, and just a reference to the source container as a thing that exists.

I also have a few questions:

• Do others feel like such a guide would be useful?
• Are there steps in my process that could be simplified, so that a guide would be as streamlined as possible?
• Are there nicer ways of running & filtering individual tests & results (partially for my own benefit too 😄 )