Use MoveIt Pro without the CLI

If the moveit_pro CLI verb is inaccessible for your use case, such as in a CI/CD Pipeline, docker compose can be used to run all the services associated with the MoveIt Pro Runtime, including the UI. You will need your workspace docker-compose.yaml to extend the services found in the docker-compose.yaml installed by MoveIt Pro (default location:/opt/moveit_pro)

The docker-compose.yaml

We recommend following the below template when extending docker-compose.yaml.

# Docker Compose file that will be merged with /opt/moveit_pro/docker-compose.yaml.
# For more details on how merging works, see https://docs.docker.com/compose/how-tos/multiple-compose-files/merge/#merging-rules.

# Services that are listed under `/opt/moveit_pro/docker-compose.yaml` are mirrored here for merging.
# Feel free to remove services here that are unmodified.
services:
  # The base image that all MoveIt Pro services extend off of. Builds the user workspace.
  base:
    build:
      # List any arguments for building the user workspace here.
      args:

  # Starts the MoveIt Pro Agent and the Bridge between the Agent and the Web UI.
  agent_bridge:

  # Starts the robot drivers.
  drivers:

  # Starts the web UI frontend.
  web_ui:

  # Developer specific configuration when running `moveit_pro dev`.
  dev:

With the correct environment, docker compose build will build packages in your workspace that launch MoveIt Pro.

Creating an envfile

Run moveit_pro configure and moveit_pro envfile to generate a .env file that has the same required parameters for a build environment that Docker will use.

You can alternatively write all the necessary environment variables yourself into the .env file for more advanced users.

Running with Docker commands

Upon crafting your build arguments and specifications in your docker-compose.yaml, you can use the following to build and run the Docker services:

note

Relative paths are used for your docker-compose.yaml in the following commands, so they must be executed from the same location.

docker compose -f /opt/moveit_pro/docker-compose.yaml -f ./docker-compose.yaml build
docker compose -f /opt/moveit_pro/docker-compose.yaml -f ./docker-compose.yaml run --rm base

Inside the container (~/user_ws), make sure to build your workspace:

colcon build

From the host, launch the agent_bridge and drivers services to start the MoveIt Pro runtime:

docker compose -f /opt/moveit_pro/docker-compose.yaml -f ./docker-compose.yaml up --build agent_bridge drivers

You can alternatively launch the dev service if you want to run the container without launching the MoveIt Pro runtime:

docker compose -f /opt/moveit_pro/docker-compose.yaml -f ./docker-compose.yaml up --build dev

Launching the Web UI

You can launch the web_ui in a separate container after following the above instructions by calling:

docker compose -f /opt/moveit_pro/docker-compose.yaml -f ./docker-compose.yaml up --build web_ui

From here, go to localhost in your browser of choice, and you can access the MoveIt Pro UI.

To simply these commands, we recommend the following alias:

alias moveit-pro-compose="docker compose -f /opt/moveit_pro/docker-compose.yaml -f ./docker-compose.yaml"

Alternative Setup

One other option is to copy the system compose configuration found at /opt/moveit_pro/docker-compose.yaml into your workspace and work with a single file. Creating an envfile is still necessary with this setup.

This will simplify the docker commands above as you will no longer need to specify -f /opt/moveit_pro/docker-compose.yaml -f ./docker-compose.yaml with each command, but you must manually replicate any changes to the system docker-compose.yaml in future releases.

Please contact [email protected] if you need assistance with creating and running this docker-compose.yaml.