Dispatcher

A Qt-based ROS 2 widget for starting, stopping, and monitoring both ROS nodes and arbitrary shell processes.

dispatcher builds its UI from a YAML file. Each configured item is launched in its own detached tmux session, and the terminal button can attach a gnome-terminal window to that session when available.

Runtime Parameters

The dispatcher executable uses the following ROS parameters:

YAML Configuration

The top-level dispatcher YAML supports:

Node Types

Each entry in nodes can be:

• A ROS process item. If type is omitted, the item is treated as ROS by default.
• A shell process item with type: shell.
• A collapsible category with type: category and an items array. Entries in items follow the same rules, including the default to ROS when type is omitted.

Common item fields include:

ROS process items can additionally define node_name plus an optional namespace, or a ros_nodes array with the same monitoring fields for online-state monitoring. An omitted namespace resolves to the root namespace, so name: talker matches the graph’s /talker; a name that is already absolute, such as /fcat/fcat, carries its own namespace.

Shell process items use pgrep on the item name to infer online state.

Scripts and Variables

Script entries support:

Variable entries support:

Examples

The following examples build incrementally from a minimal configuration to a full-featured setup. Each one corresponds to a YAML file in config/ and a screenshot in doc/.

ROS 2 Demos (runnable out of the box)

Four examples run without any custom packages, using only the demos that ship with ROS 2. Each is self-contained and includes an rqt_graph button. Install the demo packages if needed:

```bash sudo apt install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-demo-nodes-cpp \

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Changelog for package dispatcher

Forthcoming

0.4.5 (2026-09-23 16:53)

• Merge pull request #7 from nasa-jpl/fix-static-widget-lib

  fix: build dispatcher_widget as a static library

• fix: build dispatcher_widget as a static library

  Under colcon, BUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON turned dispatcher_widget into a shared library, but the only install rule installs the dispatcher executable. libdispatcher_widget.so was left in the build tree, so the installed (and Debian-packaged) executable had a dangling NEEDED entry and no RUNPATH:

  $ ros2 run dispatcher dispatcher .../dispatcher: error while loading shared libraries: libdispatcher_widget.so: cannot open shared object file

  The library is consumed only by the dispatcher executable and the in-tree gtest, and nothing ament_exports it, so linking it statically is the simplest fix. The icons qrc resource is still pulled in via the existing Q_INIT_RESOURCE(icons) call in src/dispatcher.cc.

  Verified in osrf/ros:rolling-desktop: the installed binary no longer references libdispatcher_widget.so, runs from a clean install tree, keeps its qrc resources, and the 22 unit tests pass. Reverting the STATIC keyword reproduces the loader failure.

  Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <<noreply@anthropic.com>>

• Contributors: Daniel Pastor

0.4.4 (2026-09-05 02:08)

• Merge pull request #6 from nasa-jpl/copilot/fix-bump-github-actions-job

  Fix "bump" workflow: use pull_request_target so fork-based merges can push tags

• Fix bump workflow: use pull_request_target to get write token for fork PRs

  Co-authored-by: PastorD <<7848129+PastorD@users.noreply.github.com>>

• Initial plan

• Merge pull request #4 from PastorD/feature/start-checked-on-startup

  Add checked-item startup parameter

• improve config docs

• fix category type default to match non-category behaviour

• fix namespace resolution

• add ros2 examples

• Add checked-item startup parameter

• Contributors: copilot-swe-agent[bot], Daniel Pastor

0.4.3 (2026-09-03 16:42)

• Merge pull request #5 from nasa-jpl/update-authors

  update authors

• fix author name

• update authors

• Contributors: Daniel Pastor

0.4.2 (2026-08-31 07:32)

• Merge pull request #3 from nasa-jpl/fix-rolling

  Fix rolling

• add changelo update

• use target_link_libraries instead of deprecated

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