Hopefully this isn’t shocking news, but as stated on the Gazebo classic website, Gazebo Classic will go end-of-life on January 29th, 2025. Over the span of the past few years we’ve made great efforts to ensure that both Gazebo Classic, and new Gazebo (formerly Ignition), work well with ROS 2. However, the Gazebo Classic end-of-life date is on the horizon, and starting soon Gazebo Classic will no longer be supported by the latest versions of ROS 2.
The team is now working on the ROS 2 Jazzy in earnest, and we will be upgrading ROS 2 Rolling in a couple weeks to support Ubuntu Noble (24.04). Since there are currently no plans to support Gazebo Classic 11 on Ubuntu Noble this means that Gazebo Classic will no longer be supported by the latest version of ROS 2. More specifically, this means that ROS 2 Jazzy Jalisco, the next ROS 2 long term support release, will no longer support Gazebo Classic. This shouldn’t impact the vast majority of Gazebo users right away; but it does mean that it is critical for Gazebo Classic users to start planning their transition to the latest version of Gazebo. Gazebo Classic binaries won’t magically disappear in January 2025, but security updates will end, and patching and upgrading your system will become increasingly more difficult.
We understand that upgrading to a new software version is a tedious chore; very few teams or individuals budget sufficient time to address software upgrades. We want to make sure ROS and Gazebo users are aware of the upcoming changes and have sufficient time to prepare for them. If your team does annual planning in January now would be a great time to discuss allocating time and resources towards updating both ROS and Gazebo. To help you figure out your next move we’ve put together this table that outlines which versions of Gazebo work best with which versions of ROS. Our general recommendation is that users upgrade to the latest LTS versions of both Gazebo and ROS 2 (in this case Gazebo Harmonic and ROS 2 Jazzy). Using the latest LTS ensures you have the best experience and the longest possible support horizon.
We’re trying to make the upgrade process as simple as we can make it, but to do that we need feedback from the Gazebo community. While we can’t make your deadlines go away, or have a conversation with your boss about the importance of software upgrades, we can improve our documentation and write tutorials that make the actual upgrade process easier. That’s why we’ve put together a short (seven question) survey so we can learn more from the community about how we can improve the upgrade process. If you are a Gazebo Classic user we would love to hear more about what’s keeping you from upgrading to the latest version of Gazebo. We’re going to keep this survey open for the next two weeks, and based on the feedback we receive, try to make the upgrade process as simple as it can be given the circumstances. We kindly ask that you take a few minutes to tell us how we can best help you help yourselves and also share the survey with your friends and colleagues that also use Gazebo.