Installation

pip install botrail

That is the whole install. botrail ships as a binary wheel with the Rust core and the studio UI bundled in — there is no ROS, no system package, and no GPU to set up.

Check it:

python -c "import botrail; print(botrail.__version__)"

Requirements

Python	3.9 or newer
Platforms	Linux, macOS, Windows (wheels are published for all three)
Optional	A browser, for the studio UI — it opens automatically
Optional	usdview, Omniverse, or Blender, to view exported USD animations

Nothing else is required to plan motions, bake cycles, or export results. The studio is served by botrail itself on 127.0.0.1, so it works offline.

Robot assets are not bundled

botrail loads your robot from URDF, Xacro, or USD. The repository's examples download NVIDIA's official Franka asset (~10 MB) on first run and cache it; the Quickstart instead uses a small primitive-geometry arm you can paste into a file, so it needs no downloads.

Using uv

uv add botrail          # in a project
uv pip install botrail  # into the active environment

Installing from source

You need this only to work on botrail itself — the wheel is self-contained. Building from source additionally requires Rust (stable), maturin, and Node 20+ with pnpm for the studio bundle:

git clone https://github.com/botrail/botrail
cd botrail
./scripts/build_studio.sh          # bundles the studio UI into the package
uv venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
maturin develop --uv

The studio must be built before the package

bt.studio() serves the bundle that scripts/build_studio.sh writes into python/botrail/_studio/. In a fresh checkout that directory does not exist yet and the launcher raises a FileNotFoundError telling you so.

See Contributing for the development loop and the test suites.

Next

Load a robot and open the studio in the Quickstart.