rostopic command not found

Introduction

When you run more command in linux terminal / console, you get the following error message

rostopic: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: rostopic: command not found

Solutions to rostopic: command not found

How To Fix rostopic: command not found in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux / Raspbian

In Ubuntu rostopic is provided by python3-rostopic package.

python3-rostopic is:

This package is part of Robot OS (ROS). This tool helps debugging by showing debug information about ROS Topics, including publishers, subscribers, publishing rate, and ROS Messages. It also contains an experimental Python library for getting information about, and interacting with, topics dynamically. This library is for internal use only as the code API may change, though it does provide examples of how to implement dynamic subscription and publication behaviors in ROS.

This package contains the Python 3 library.

To fix this problem, we can install more using the command below.

sudo apt-get -y install python3-rostopic

This command might take some time to finish depending on your machine internet connection.

You can also use apt command to install python3-rostopic.

sudo apt -y install python3-rostopic

Or if you have aptitude installed you can use the following command.

sudo aptitude install python3-rostopic

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to fix rostopic command not found error in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux or Raspbian distribution.