Dear Gazebo Community,
It is bittersweet to announce that Gazebo Classic (Gazebo11) has reached end-of-life (EOL). It was released in January, 2020 and was a Long Term Supported (LTS) release with support lasting 5 years. This is a significant EOL in that, going forward only versions of modern Gazebo will be supported by the Gazebo team. As of today all versions of Gazebo Classic, denoted by numbered release names, are end of life. We recommend that users upgrade to Gazebo Harmonic or Gazebo Fortress as soon as reasonably possible.
Gazebo Classic introduced many exciting features, including SDFormat 1.7 frame semantics, Support for BVH skeletal animations, Slow motion / sped up log playback, and Tracked vehicles with flippers to name a few. See the entire list of features on the release blog post and on the source changelog.
What does End of Life Mean?
Users often ask us, “what does end of life mean?” To put it briefly, end of life means that the Gazebo team will no longer support that particular Gazebo release. In practical terms, this means that we will no longer be providing the following for Gazebo Classic:
- New features or capabilities
- Security updates
- Bug fixes, patches or support
- Updated binaries
It is also worth noting the things that won’t change after Gazebo Classic goes end of life:
- Gazebo Classic binaries will not suddenly disappear
- Users will not need to migrate immediately, but they should migrate as soon as possible
Why do we End of Life Gazebo releases?
We End of Life particular Gazebo releases for the same reason that most people don’t use Windows XP or an iPhone 4 anymore: better versions of the software are now available and we simply don’t have the resources to support every Gazebo release into perpetuity. Marking a particular version of Gazebo end of life frees up resources to help support newer and better versions of the software. More to the point, the underlying packages and operating system (Ubuntu Focal) used by Gazebo Classic also goes end of life in April 2025.
How do I upgrade to a newer version of Gazebo and which one should I use?
We recommend that Gazebo Classic users upgrade to the latest long term support release of modern Gazebo, Gazebo Harmonic. Gazebo Harmonic works best on Ubuntu Jammy (22.04) and Ubuntu Noble (24.04) and will be supported until September of 2028. Gazebo Classic users who still use ROS 1 will also need to upgrade to ROS 2 Jazzy to use Gazebo Harmonic. It is worth noting that all of ROS 1, including ROS 1 Noetic, will go end of life on May 23rd, 2025. Our internal estimates indicate that over 80% of the ROS community has already upgraded to ROS 2, and 67% of Gazebo users have already upgraded to modern Gazebo.
The modern Gazebo documentation includes a variety of guides and tutorials on how to migrate your project from Gazebo Classic to modern Gazebo. Similarly, the ROS 2 documentation provides step by step instructions on how to migrate your ROS 1 project to ROS 2. If you get stuck during migration, we would encourage you to use the Open Robotics Discord, the Gazebo Sim Community, and Robotics Stack Exchange to find help.
Help Spread the Word
We realize that many Gazebo Classic users don’t really track Gazebo end of life dates, or regularly visit Gazebosim Community, that’s why we’ve decided to include some notifications about Gazebo Classic’s end of life in our latest update. After updating to the latest release, Gazebo Classic users will be notified via debug output and a banner of end of life status. These warnings can be suppressed by simply setting a “GAZEBO_SUPPRESS_EOL_WARNING” environment variable.
We would appreciate the community’s help in spreading the word about the Gazebo Classic End of Life. If you work on a team that is still using Gazebo Classic please take a moment in the next week or two to discuss upgrade paths with your team and the importance of upgrading as soon as possible.
Supporting Libraries Reaching EOL
As part of the Gazebo Classic EOL, the following Gazebo libraries have also reached end-of-life. Their latest released binaries will remain available at http://packages.osrfoundation.org/, but no more fixes or releases will be made.
| Library major version | Final release |
|---|---|
| gz-common3 (ignition-common3) | 3.17.1 |
| gz-fuel-tools4 (ignition-fuel-tools4) | 4.9.2 |
| gz-msgs5 (ignition-msgs5) | 5.11.1 |
| gz-transport8 (ignition-transport8) | 8.5.1 |
| libsdformat9 | 9.10.2 |
| Gazebo11 (Gazebo Classic) | 11.15.1 |
We sincerely thank everyone in the community that has contributed to Gazebo Classic 
Gazebo Dev Team