system_fingerprint

A simple tool for getting information about a system to share

Note: This is the documentation for ROS 1. Click here for ROS 2

Let's say you're helping someone debug their system. You could ask them a bunch of questions, and get them to send you the output of various commands, but that sounds tedious.

Instead, have them install this package (sudo apt-get install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-system-fingerprint) and then run a single command:

rosrun system_fingerprint imprint

This will generate the file fingerprint.yaml which they can send to you for debugging. What sort of information is in this file?

• System Information (system) - Information about your OS and other tidbits about the machine the command is run on.
• Environmental Variables (environmental_variables) - All the environmental variables with the prefix ROS_, such as ROS_DISTRO, ROS_VERSION, etc.
• Parameters (parameters) - A full dump of the ROS parameters.
• Nodes (nodes) - The full rosgraph, i.e. every node and their publications, subscriptions and services.
• Topics (topics) - The type of each available topic
• Services (services) - The type of each available service
• ROS Workspace (workspace) - What build tool you're using, the workspace location, which repos you have checked out and what version they are on.

Example

See example_fingerprint.yaml