Getting Help

Searching For Your Question

If you need help with Drake, please first review the documentation on this website for things such as installation, the C++ API, or Using Drake from Python.

Please also briefly review Drake’s open and closed GitHub issues and StackOverflow posts tagged for Drake to see if your issue has been encountered by someone else before.

Asking Your Question

If you know your question is a bug or feature request, please post a GitHub issue.

Otherwise, if you are seeking troubleshooting advice or other assistance with how to apply Drake to specific purposes (e.g., tutorials or a brief example), then please post a question on StackOverflow with the drake tag.

If you are actively developing with Drake and may need more active discussions than what StackOverflow and GitHub may offer, consider asking for access to the Drake Developers Slack Channel. To do so, please email Russ Tedrake for access. Please note that this access may not always be readily granted. (Note: If you are a Drake developer wanting to invite someone, it will be faster to grant them access if you invite them directly via Slack.)

If you wish to contribute a patch, please see how to submit a pull request.

Helpful Information

When reporting an issue, please consider providing the following information (helper command in monospace):

  • Operating system (e.g., Ubuntu Jammy 22.04 or macOS Ventura)
  • Installation method (e.g., pip, apt, binary tar.gz, docker image, or rebuilding from source)
  • Language you are using (C++ or Python)
    • If using C++:
      • C++ compiler (e.g., GCC 11.4, Clang 14.0)
    • If using Python:
      • Python version (e.g., Python 3.10)
      • Python distribution (e.g., Ubuntu apt, macOS homebrew)
  • If building from source:
    • Build system (Bazel or CMake)
      • Bazel version (which bazel; bazel version)
      • CMake version (which cmake; cmake --version)
      • CMake C++ compiler (cmake -LA <path_to_source_dir> | grep 'CMAKE_.*_COMPILER')
    • Git revision (git rev-parse --short HEAD)
    • Building Drake from source vs. downstream project (like drake_bazel_external, drake_cmake_external)
  • If using binary release:
    • Download URL
    • Contents of drake/share/doc/drake/VERSION.TXT
    • Building downstream project (drake_cmake_installed)
  • If using Deepnote, Google Colaboratory, or Binder:
    • A version of your notebook that we can access. Please check this by re-visiting your URL in a private browsing window. (You can add notebooks to public GitHub Gists.)

    • The version of pydrake you are using. To obtain the version information it, please add the following code to a cell and execute it:

      !cat /opt/drake/share/doc/drake/VERSION.TXT

      The output should look something like YYYYMMDDHHMMSS <git-sha>.