Testing and CI

Every pull request and every push to the default branch runs automated checks with GitHub Actions. A PR is only merged when they pass.

diffbot

Workflow	File	What it checks
CI	.github/workflows/diffbot_ci_action.yml	Builds and tests all catkin packages with industrial_ci, against ROS Noetic packages from the ROS testing and main repositories (one job each)
Build base controller	.github/workflows/build_base_controller.yml	Builds the Teensy firmware in diffbot_base/scripts/base_controller with PlatformIO, once for each board in its platformio.ini: teensy40 (Teensy 4.0) and teensy31 (Teensy 3.1/3.2)
Dev container	.github/workflows/devcontainer.yml	Builds the dev container image, creates the container (which builds the workspace), then builds and runs the tests in it

industrial_ci

industrial_ci starts a ROS Docker image, installs the packages' dependencies with rosdep, builds the workspace with catkin and runs the tests. The workflow runs it twice: with ROS packages from the main repository, which users install, and from testing, where new package versions appear first (ROS testing repository).

ccache speeds up the C++ builds. The workflow stores its cache with actions/cache. The cache key contains the run ID, so each successful run saves a new cache, and restore-keys loads the newest one at the start of the next run.

Dev container workflow

devcontainers/ci creates the container exactly as VS Code or the Dev Container CLI would, including setup.sh, which builds the workspace. Then it runs:

catkin build --catkin-make-args run_tests
catkin_test_results build

So a broken Dockerfile, a missing dependency or a failing build shows up in the PR, not on a developer's machine weeks later.

Tests

The packages have no test cases yet, so the checks prove that everything builds, not that it behaves correctly. Tests are planned as part of the roadmap.

GitHub Actions versions

The workflows use the latest major versions of the GitHub actions, which run on Node 24. GitHub retires old versions: in 2026 the CI workflow failed before building anything because actions/cache@v2 had been switched off (GitHub notice), and Node 20 actions were retired in September 2026 (GitHub changelog). When a check fails during "Set up job", an outdated action is the likely cause.

Writing tests and debugging

• Tests: ROS 1 packages use gtest for C++ unit tests and rostest for tests that start ROS nodes. Ros-Test-Example shows both in a catkin workspace (slides). catkin-tools explains building and running tests.

• Debugging: a debugger can only stop at breakpoints in a workspace built with debug symbols:

  catkin build --save-config --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
  

  See the catkin-tools cheat sheet for more.

Running the checks locally

• Workspace build and tests: in the dev container, in ~/catkin_ws, run the two commands from the dev container workflow above.

• Firmware: build it on the host, not in the ROS container: the current PlatformIO Teensy tools need a newer C library (glibc 2.34 or later) than Ubuntu 20.04 has. In our test, the Teensy tool teensy_size stopped with a missing GLIBC_2.34 in the ROS container. CI builds on Ubuntu 24.04, and the steps below were tested on Ubuntu 24.04 (WSL 2) with Python 3.12 and PlatformIO 6.2. From the diffbot folder:

  sudo apt install python3-venv
  python3 -m venv ~/.venvs/platformio
  ~/.venvs/platformio/bin/pip install platformio
  cd diffbot_base/scripts/base_controller
  ~/.venvs/platformio/bin/pio run
  

  pio run builds the Teensy 4.0, the default environment; pio run -e teensy31 builds the Teensy 3.1/3.2.

This documentation site

Workflow	File	What it does
Documentation CI	.github/workflows/ci.yml	Builds the site with mkdocs build --strict, which fails on any warning (strict mode), such as a broken link or anchor (link validation). On a push to main it also publishes the site to the gh-pages branch, which GitHub Pages serves at ros-mobile-robots.com.
Lint	.github/workflows/lint.yml	Checks the spelling with codespell; its settings are in .codespellrc.
PR preview	.github/workflows/preview.yml	Builds each pull request from a branch in this repository and publishes it at https://ros-mobile-robots.com/pr-preview/pr-<number>/, so changes can be checked on the real site before merging. The preview is removed when the PR is closed. Pull requests from forks get no preview, only the build and spelling checks.

To build the site locally:

pip install -r requirements.txt
mkdocs serve

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