Contribute

There are numerous ways to contribute to ROS Index, either by adding packages, contributing documentation to existing packages, or adding more analytics to the website itself.

Contents

Adding ROS Packages

The majority of repositories listed on ROS Index are discovered via the rosdistro system. As such, the easiest way to add a repository to ROS Index is to add it to rosdistro. While rosdistro is used to index distributed packages, it is also used to automatically create API documentation for source packages. Note that there is no presumed contract or implied maintainance responsibility if you add your repository to rosdistro.

Adding a Repository to rosdistro

If you would like you get your code indexed for documentation, click the button below.

Add a Repository to the Index

Releasing Binary Packages

Releasing a package for binary distribution is a bit more complicated, and cannot be done through a web interface. It will, however, make it much easier for users to run your code. In order to release your repository’s packages, follow the tutorials for the bloom release automation tool on the ROS.org Wiki.

Adding ROS Index Metadata

In addition to standard README formats, ROS Index also inspects ROS package manifest XML files for ROS Index-specific <export> tags in order to read additional metadata.

See ROS Index Metadata for documentation on these tags.

Contributing Content to Packages Maintained by Others

There are many documented ROS repositories and packages out there, but there are even more which lack descriptions or even README files. One of the best ways to contribute to ROS Index is to contribute documentation to the indexed packages directly.

For example, if you find a package without a good description or README, it’s very easy to write up your own notes, and submit them as a pull request on the hosting site (GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab, etc).

For packages which are hosted on systems that don’t support pull requests, or packages which are no longer maintained, feel free to fork those packages on GitHub, add documentation, and get them indexed as forks.

You can also contribute by fixing bugs or adding new features to packages or by reviewing the contributions proposed or submitted by others as pull requests. If you would like some suggestions where your help may be welcomed, click the button below.

Contribution Suggestions

Opting out of Indexing

If you do not want a branch of your repository to be shown on ROS Index, simply create a file called .rosindex_ignore at the root of the repository in that branch:

touch .rosindex_ignore

If you do not want a single package in a repository indexed, you can create a .rosindex_ignore file at the root of that package. If this does not work or you want some other information removed from ROS Index, please create an issue on GitHub describing what you would like removed.

Contribute to the ROS Index Website

ROS Index is a statically-generated website which is stored and hosted entirely on GitHub. The website uses the Jekyll framework with some custom plugins for cloning and scraping known ROS repositories. Since it uses custom plugins, and generation is space- and computationally-expensive, it needs to be generated offline, and then uploaded to GitHub’s severs.

Since the ROS Index website is completely open-source, issues, feature requests, and especially pull requests are welcome.

Post an Issue

For more details on developing ROS Index, see development.