Fleet Coder

Fleet Coder is a Visual Studio Code extension designed to simplify and streamline development workflows across multiple ROS-based robots or Linux machines in a fleet. With the click of a button, you can sync code, run builds, launch ROS nodes, and manage remote files seamlessly over SSH.

Made with ❤️ for robotics developers managing the chaos of multi-robot systems.

Install Notes

No supoort for Windows.

For Linux based systems, install sshpass using:

Ubuntu

sudo apt install sshpass

Arch-based

sudo pacman -S sshpass

Fedora

sudo dnf install sshpass

For support on Mac

brew install hudochenkov/sshpass/sshpass

or

brew install sshpass

🔧 Features

• Sync Workspace
  Recursively synchronize your entire workspace to all target devices using rsync. Supports exclusions for folders (like build/, .git/, etc.).

• ROS-Aware Build and Launch Buttons

  • Automatically run colcon build or your preferred build command.
  • Source your workspace (e.g. source install/setup.bash) before running any ROS commands.
  • Launch ROS nodes via ros launch commands directly from the UI.

• Configurable via Settings
  Customize:

  • SSH credentials (username, password or key)
  • Build commands
  • Source commands (multiple supported)
  • Path to IP list CSV
  • Exclude folders during sync

🛠️ Setup

1. Install the extension in VS Code.
2. Create a CSV file listing the IPs of the machines in your fleet.
3. Configure the extension via VS Code settings (File > Preferences > Settings > Extensions > Fleet Coder) or Ctrl + , and search fleet-coder.

Example settings:

"fleet-coder.username": "thymio",
"fleet-coder.password": "robot123",
"fleet-coder.ipCsvPath": "/home/user/fleet_ips.csv",
"fleet-coder.buildCommand": "colcon build",
"fleet-coder.sourceBeforeBuild": [
  "source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash"
],
"fleet-coder.sourceAfterBuild": [
  "source install/setup.bash"
],
"fleet-coder.excludeFolders": [
  "build",
  "install",
  ".git"
]

For the developers

Incase you would like to extend the functionality, you should have node version >=14 and vscode version >1.98.0 to build and run this project.

node -v
code --verison

GitHub