Template for Isaac Lab Projects

Overview

This repository serves as a template for building projects or extensions based on Isaac Lab. It allows you to develop in an isolated environment, outside of the core Isaac Lab repository.

Key Features:

• Isolation Work outside the core Isaac Lab repository, ensuring that your development efforts remain self-contained.
• Flexibility This template is set up to allow your code to be run as an extension in Omniverse.

Keywords: extension, template, isaaclab

Installation

• Install Isaac Lab by following the installation guide. We recommend using the conda installation as it simplifies calling Python scripts from the terminal.

• Clone the repository separately from the Isaac Lab installation (i.e. outside the IsaacLab directory):

# Option 1: HTTPS
git clone https://github.com/isaac-sim/IsaacLabExtensionTemplate.git

# Option 2: SSH
git clone git@github.com:isaac-sim/IsaacLabExtensionTemplate.git

• Throughout the repository, the name ext_template only serves as an example and we provide a script to rename all the references to it automatically:

# Enter the repository
cd IsaacLabExtensionTemplate
# Rename all occurrences of ext_template (in files/directories) to your_fancy_extension_name
python scripts/rename_template.py your_fancy_extension_name

• Using a python interpreter that has Isaac Lab installed, install the library

python -m pip install -e exts/ext_template

• Verify that the extension is correctly installed by running the following command:

python scripts/rsl_rl/train.py --task=Template-Isaac-Velocity-Rough-Anymal-D-v0

Set up IDE (Optional)

To setup the IDE, please follow these instructions:

• Run VSCode Tasks, by pressing Ctrl+Shift+P, selecting Tasks: Run Task and running the setup_python_env in the drop down menu. When running this task, you will be prompted to add the absolute path to your Isaac Sim installation.

If everything executes correctly, it should create a file .python.env in the .vscode directory. The file contains the python paths to all the extensions provided by Isaac Sim and Omniverse. This helps in indexing all the python modules for intelligent suggestions while writing code.

Setup as Omniverse Extension (Optional)

We provide an example UI extension that will load upon enabling your extension defined in exts/ext_template/ext_template/ui_extension_example.py. For more information on UI extensions, enable and check out the source code of the omni.isaac.ui_template extension and refer to the introduction on Isaac Sim Workflows 1.2.3. GUI.

To enable your extension, follow these steps:

1. Add the search path of your repository to the extension manager:

   • Navigate to the extension manager using Window -> Extensions.
   • Click on the Hamburger Icon (☰), then go to Settings.
   • In the Extension Search Paths, enter the absolute path to IsaacLabExtensionTemplate/exts
   • If not already present, in the Extension Search Paths, enter the path that leads to Isaac Lab's extension directory directory (IsaacLab/source/extensions)
   • Click on the Hamburger Icon (☰), then click Refresh.

2. Search and enable your extension:

   • Find your extension under the Third Party category.
   • Toggle it to enable your extension.

Docker setup

Building Isaac Lab Base Image

Currently, we don't have the Docker for Isaac Lab publicly available. Hence, you'd need to build the docker image for Isaac Lab locally by following the steps here.

Once you have built the base Isaac Lab image, you can check it exists by doing:

docker images

# Output should look something like:
#
# REPOSITORY                       TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED          SIZE
# isaac-lab-base                   latest    28be62af627e   32 minutes ago   18.9GB

Building Isaac Lab Template Image

Following above, you can build the docker container for this project. It is called isaac-lab-template. However, you can modify this name inside the docker/docker-compose.yaml.

cd docker
docker compose --env-file .env.base --file docker-compose.yaml build isaac-lab-template

You can verify the image is built successfully using the same command as earlier:

docker images

# Output should look something like:
#
# REPOSITORY                       TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED             SIZE
# isaac-lab-template               latest    00b00b647e1b   2 minutes ago       18.9GB
# isaac-lab-base                   latest    892938acb55c   About an hour ago   18.9GB

Running the container

After building, the usual next step is to start the containers associated with your services. You can do this with:

docker compose --env-file .env.base --file docker-compose.yaml up

This will start the services defined in your docker-compose.yaml file, including isaac-lab-template.

If you want to run it in detached mode (in the background), use:

docker compose --env-file .env.base --file docker-compose.yaml up -d

Interacting with a running container

If you want to run commands inside the running container, you can use the exec command:

docker exec --interactive --tty -e DISPLAY=${DISPLAY} isaac-lab-template /bin/bash

Shutting down the container

When you are done or want to stop the running containers, you can bring down the services:

docker compose --env-file .env.base --file docker-compose.yaml down

This stops and removes the containers, but keeps the images.

Code formatting

We have a pre-commit template to automatically format your code. To install pre-commit:

pip install pre-commit

Then you can run pre-commit with:

pre-commit run --all-files

Troubleshooting

Pylance Missing Indexing of Extensions

In some VsCode versions, the indexing of part of the extensions is missing. In this case, add the path to your extension in .vscode/settings.json under the key "python.analysis.extraPaths".

{
    "python.analysis.extraPaths": [
        "<path-to-ext-repo>/exts/ext_template"
    ]
}

Pylance Crash

If you encounter a crash in pylance, it is probable that too many files are indexed and you run out of memory. A possible solution is to exclude some of omniverse packages that are not used in your project. To do so, modify .vscode/settings.json and comment out packages under the key "python.analysis.extraPaths" Some examples of packages that can likely be excluded are:

"<path-to-isaac-sim>/extscache/omni.anim.*"         // Animation packages
"<path-to-isaac-sim>/extscache/omni.kit.*"          // Kit UI tools
"<path-to-isaac-sim>/extscache/omni.graph.*"        // Graph UI tools
"<path-to-isaac-sim>/extscache/omni.services.*"     // Services tools
...