Gazebo Classic and Citadel End of Life

General
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Hi Everyone,

This is your friendly reminder that as outlined here Gazebo Classic (i.e. Gazebo 11) will officially go end of life on Friday, January 31st, 2025. Gazebo Citadel, our first modern Gazebo LTS release, will go end of life on December 30th, 2024. Gazebo Classic users are advised to transition to an LTS modern Gazebo release as soon as possible (we recommend Gazebo Harmonic, or Gazebo Fortress). We recommend that Gazebo Citadel users also upgrade to either Harmonic or Fortress. Information about currently supported Gazebo versions and support windows, can be found here.

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
  • Your project will not suddenly stop working on January 31st

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 impending end of life in our latest Gazebo Classic update. Starting this week, after updating Gazebo Classic users will be notified via debug output and GUI banners of the upcoming end of life date. 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 upcoming 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.

:gazebo: The Gazebo Dev Team :gazebo:

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