CLI Command: genesys doctor

The genesys doctor command is a diagnostic tool that checks your local environment for common configuration problems that could prevent Genesys or ROS 2 from working correctly.

It's a good first step for troubleshooting your development environment.

Usage

genesys doctor

Checks Performed

The doctor runs the following checks in order.

1. PATH Configuration

This check ensures that you can run genesys and other Python-installed tools from any directory.

  • What it does: Verifies that the directory where pip installs command-line scripts is included in your system's PATH environment variable.
  • How it works: It uses Python's sysconfig.get_path('scripts') to find the correct local scripts directory for your environment and then checks if that directory is present in the os.environ['PATH'] variable.
  • Why it matters: If this path is missing, you might get a "command not found" error when trying to run genesys after installing it. The doctor will provide the exact export command needed to fix this, both for the current session and permanently by adding it to your .bashrc or .zshrc file.

2. ROS 2 Environment

This check verifies that a ROS 2 distribution has been sourced.

  • What it does: Checks if the ROS_DISTRO environment variable is set and if the corresponding ROS 2 setup.bash script can be found.
  • Why it matters: If you haven't sourced a ROS 2 distribution, most ros2 and genesys commands will fail because they can't find the core ROS 2 packages.

3. Missing System Dependencies

This check finds and installs missing system dependencies for the packages in your workspace.

  • What it does: If run from within a workspace (i.e., a src directory is present), it will run rosdep to check for any missing system dependencies (e.g., libopencv-dev) required by the packages in src/.
  • How it works: It executes the following command: 
    rosdep install --from-paths src -y --ignore-src
    • --from-paths src: Tells rosdep to look at the package.xml files of all packages inside the src directory.
    • -y: Automatically answers "yes" to all prompts from the system's package manager (e.g., apt-get), installing dependencies non-interactively.
    • --ignore-src: Prevents rosdep from trying to resolve the packages in your src directory as system packages, which is the correct behavior.
  • Why it matters: This ensures that when you run genesys build, the compilation won't fail due to missing system libraries that your ROS 2 packages depend on.