colb

A colcon wrapper that makes building and testing single packages more convenient during development.

Overview

While working on package, one typically performs the following steps:

1. Build all the dependent packages
2. Make some changes
3. Rebuild the package
4. Run the tests

This usually requires multiple colcon invocations. With this tool, it is enough to run:

colb test -r my_package

Examples

To get an overview over the available options:

colb help
colb help <verb>

Rebuilding just the current package:

colb build -s my_package

Building and running only a single unit test (only works after the package has been built once):

colb test my_package --test my_unit_test

To minimize the steps involved in getting a test output, this will directly invoke ninja and ctest.

If the current directory is already somewhere inside a package, the package name may be omitted from the command line:

cd my_ws/src/my_repo/my_package/src
colb build

Requirements

The invoced commands make use of the colcon-common-extensions and colcon mixins by default, so they should be installed. By default, the ccache, ninja and mold mixins are enabled, so the associated programs should be installed.

Installation

cargo install --path .

Configuration

It is possible to customize the options used for the dependency build and for the active package. The default settings can be written to a .colb.toml file using the colb init command. Further invocations will then load the options from this file, which also doubles as a workspace root marker.