Ros deployment

edit

Hi!

We are nearing the deployment stage of our system and I'm wondering what the best way is to handle this. We are using docker for our deployments and want to keep these as small as possible. So we want to only include compiled code (and python code).

I have understood from other questions that you can use catkin_make install and copy over the install folder and then source that as usual. But does this include python code? Or only compiled code? How should you handle the python code?

What is minimally needed by ros at runtime? Are there things you can exclude when you have built everything and just need runtime dependencies?