Supported Configurations

The following table shows the configurations and platforms that Drake officially supports:

“Official support” means that we have Continuous Integration test coverage to notice regressions, so if it doesn’t work for you then please file a bug report.

Unofficially, Drake is also likely to be compatible with newer versions of Ubuntu or macOS than what are listed, or with Ubuntu running on arm64, or with other versions of Python or Java. However, these are not supported so if it doesn’t work for you then please file a pull request with the fix, not a bug report.

All else being equal, we would recommend developers use Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy).

⁽¹⁾ Drake features that perform image rendering (e.g., camera simulation) require a working display server. Most personal computers will have this already built in, but some cloud or docker environments may require extra setup steps.

⁽²⁾ CPython is the only Python implementation supported.

⁽³⁾ Drake requires a compiler running in C++20 (or greater) mode.

Getting Drake

Run:

git clone --filter=blob:none https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/drake.git

Note: we suggest you keep the default clone directory name (drake) and not rename it (such as drake2). The CLion integration will suffer if the checkout directory is not named drake. (See CLion IDE setup for details.)

Note: the build process may encounter problems if you have unusual characters like parentheses in the absolute path to the drake directory (see #394).

Using a fork of Drake

The above git clone command will configure Drake’s primary repository as a remote called origin. If you plan to fork Drake for development, we recommend that you configure your fork of Drake’s primary repository as the origin remote and Drake’s primary repository as the upstream remote. This can be done by executing the following commands:

cd drake
git remote set-url origin git@github.com:[your github user name]/drake.git
git remote add upstream https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/drake.git
git remote set-url --push upstream no_push

We recommend that you setup SSH access to github.com to avoid needing to type your password each time you access it.

Mandatory platform-specific instructions

Before running the build, you must follow some one-time platform-specific setup steps.

Ubuntu:

sudo ./setup/ubuntu/install_prereqs.sh

macOS:

We assume that you have already installed Xcode (from the Mac App Store).

After that, run:

./setup/mac/install_prereqs.sh

Build with Bazel

For instructions, jump to Developing Drake using Bazel, or check out the full details at:

• Bazel build system

Building the Python Bindings

To use the Python bindings from Drake externally, we recommend using CMake. As an example:

git clone https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/drake.git
mkdir drake-build
cd drake-build
cmake ../drake
make install

Note that a concurrency limit passed to make (e.g., make -j 2) has almost no effect on the Drake build. You might need to add a bazel configuration dotfile to your home directory if your build is running out of memory. See the troubleshooting page for details.

Be aware that repeatedly running make install will install the recompiled version of Drake on top of the prior version. This will lead to disaster unless the set of installed filenames is exactly the same (because old files will be hanging around polluting your PYTHONPATH). It is safe if you are merely tweaking a source code file and repeatedly installing, without any changes to the build system. For any kind of larger change (e.g., upgrading to a newer Drake), we strongly advise that you delete the prior tree (within the install sub-directory) before running make.

Please note the additional CMake options which affect the Python bindings:

• -DWITH_GUROBI={ON, [OFF]} - Build with Gurobi enabled.
• -DWITH_MOSEK={ON, [OFF]} - Build with MOSEK™ enabled.
• -DWITH_SNOPT={ON, [OFF]} - Build with SNOPT enabled.

{...} means a list of options, and the option surrounded by [...] is the default option. An example of building pydrake with both Gurobi and MOSEK™, without building tests:

cmake -DWITH_GUROBI=ON -DWITH_MOSEK=ON ../drake

You will also need to have your PYTHONPATH configured correctly.

Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy):

cd drake-build
export PYTHONPATH=${PWD}/install/lib/python3.10/site-packages:${PYTHONPATH}

Ubuntu 24.04 (Jammy):

cd drake-build
export PYTHONPATH=${PWD}/install/lib/python3.12/site-packages:${PYTHONPATH}

macOS:

cd drake-build
export PYTHONPATH=${PWD}/install/lib/python3.12/site-packages:${PYTHONPATH}