Python binding for Eclipse Cyclone DDS

A work in progress Python binding for Eclipse Cyclone DDS.

Getting Started

Eclipse CycloneDDS Python requires Python version 3.6 or higher. It can be installed with included Cyclone DDS binaries or leveraging an existing Cyclone DDS installation by installing from source.

Installing with pre-built Cyclone DDS binaries

This is the most straightforward method to install Cyclone DDS Python, but there are a couple of caveats. The pre-built package:

• does not include the Cyclone DDS IDL compiler,
• has no support for DDS Security,
• has no support for shared memory via Iceoryx,
• comes with generic Cyclone DDS binaries that are not optimized per-platform.

If these are of concern, proceed with an installation from source. If not, running this installation is as simple as:

$ pip install cyclonedds

If you get permission errors you are using your system python. This is not recommended, we recommend using a virtual environment, poetry, pipenv or pyenv. If you just want to get going, you can add --user to your pip command to install for the current user. See the Installing Python Modules Python documentation.

Installing from source

When installing from source you can make use of the full list of features offered by Cyclone DDS. First install Cyclone DDS as normal. Then continue by setting the CYCLONEDDS_HOME environment variable to the installation location of Cyclone DDS, which is the same as what was used for CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX. You will have to have this variable active any time you run Python code that depends on cyclonedds so adding it to .bashrc on Linux, ~/bash_profile on MacOS or the System Variables in Windows can be helpful. This also allows you to switch, move or update Cyclone DDS without recompiling the Python package.

You can either install the source from the latest release from pypi:

$ export CYCLONEDDS_HOME="/path/to/cyclone"
$ pip install cyclonedds --no-binary :all:

or you can download the code from this repository to get the bleeding edge and directly install from your local filesystem:

$ git clone https://github.com/eclipse-cyclonedds/cyclonedds-python
$ cd cyclonedds-python
$ export CYCLONEDDS_HOME="/path/to/cyclone"
$ pip install ./src/pycdr
$ pip install ./src/cyclonedds

If you get permission errors you are using your system python. This is not recommended, we recommend using a virtual environment, poetry, pipenv or pyenv. If you just want to get going, you can add --user to your pip command to install for the current user. See the Installing Python Modules Python documentation.

Installing the Python backend for the IDL compiler

The code for the Python backend for the IDL compiler is contained in src/idlpy and builds like any other cmake project:

$ git clone https://github.com/eclipse-cyclonedds/cyclonedds-python
$ cd cyclonedds-python/src/idlpy
$ mkdir build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<install-location> \
        -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="<cyclonedds-install-location>" \
        ..
$ cmake --build .
$ cmake --build . --target install

For more details on this process take a look at the Eclipse Cyclone DDS C++ repository which explains the cmake process in depth.