Choose your Gazebo version by your ROS 2 version. Gazebo’s ROS installation guide pairs ROS 2 Jazzy with Gazebo Harmonic, ROS 2 Lyrical with Gazebo Jetty and ROS 2 Humble with Gazebo Fortress. If you’re not using ROS, install Gazebo Jetty, the newest long-term support release, out since September 2025 and supported until May 2031 according to the Gazebo releases page.
For someone starting from nothing, the same guide still recommends Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble), ROS 2 Jazzy and Gazebo Harmonic, because that combination has the most tutorials and packages behind it. That’s the safe default as of October 19, 2026.
Gazebo versions that are still supported
Gazebo ships a named release each year, in alphabetical order. As of October 2026:
- Jetty (LTS): released September 2025, end of life May 2031. The 10th major release.
- Ionic: released September 2024, end of life December 2026. Not an LTS; skip it for new projects.
- Harmonic (LTS): released September 2023, end of life May 2029.
- Fortress (LTS): released September 2021, end of life May 2027.
- Next release (“M”): planned for March 2027, with end of life in December 2028.
Garden and Citadel have reached end of life. There’s also Rotary, a nightly rolling build of every Gazebo library meant for maintainers and CI systems, not for most users.
If a tutorial tells you to run gazebo or install gazebo11, it’s for Gazebo Classic, the older simulator that reached end of life in January 2025. Today’s Gazebo (formerly called Ignition) uses the gz command instead. Models and worlds in SDF format carry over, but plugins and launch files don’t.
Matching Gazebo to ROS 2
The ROS guide marks one recommended Gazebo for each ROS 2 release:
- ROS 2 Humble (LTS, Ubuntu 22.04): Fortress. Harmonic is possible through unofficial packages, with effort.
- ROS 2 Jazzy (LTS, Ubuntu 24.04): Harmonic. No other combination is supported.
- ROS 2 Kilted: Ionic.
- ROS 2 Lyrical (LTS): Jetty.
- ROS 2 Rolling: Jetty.
Since Jazzy, the ROS package repository ships Gazebo as “vendor packages,” so you don’t need Gazebo’s own repository to use it with ROS. On a ROS system, one command installs the matching Gazebo and the ROS–Gazebo bridge. For Jazzy it’s sudo apt-get install ros-jazzy-ros-gz; swap in your ROS release name for other versions. Mixing an unpaired version breaks the official ROS packages that depend on Gazebo, so the guide tells beginners not to try.
For choosing a ROS 2 release itself, see our Korean guide to which ROS 2 version to install, or start with a first ROS 2 session with turtlesim.
Installing Gazebo Jetty without ROS
Jetty is officially supported only on Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble) on amd64. Arm computers, Windows and macOS are supported on a best-effort basis, so expect rough edges there. The Ubuntu install page uses Gazebo’s own package repository:
- Install the tools: sudo apt-get update, then sudo apt-get install curl lsb-release gnupg
- Download the repository key from packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo.gpg to /usr/share/keyrings/pkgs-osrf-archive-keyring.gpg, and add the ubuntu-stable repository to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gazebo-stable.list (the install page has the exact two lines to paste).
- Run sudo apt-get update, then sudo apt-get install gz-jetty
- Start a sample world: gz sim shapes.sdf
For headless servers and CI, Gazebo publishes a lighter package without the GUI or Qt: gz-sim10-server. Its binary sits at /usr/libexec/gz/sim10/gz-sim-server and isn’t on your PATH by default.
To remove Gazebo later: sudo apt remove gz-jetty, then sudo apt autoremove.
When Gazebo is the wrong tool
Gazebo is strongest for testing ROS-based robots, sensors and navigation stacks, where the ROS bridge and plugins save work. If you need GPU-parallel reinforcement learning with thousands of robots, NVIDIA Isaac Lab or MuJoCo-based tools are built for that; see getting started with Isaac Lab. Our robot simulator comparison lays out the trade-offs between Gazebo, Isaac Sim and MuJoCo, and the URDF vs SDF guide explains the model formats Gazebo reads.