[andrewjong]

Motivation

While live-testing the Foxglove auto-layout feature (#401), the robot container's autolaunch chain bws && sws && ros2 launch ... died silently: one package failed to build (a machine-local stale dpvo leftover needing nvcc), the && chain short-circuited, and the tmux pane just returned to a prompt. docker logs showed nothing. The symptom surfaced only far downstream — "Foxglove has a connection issue" (empty panels, no robot topics on the GCS domain) — and took a full debugging session to trace back to a build failure at bring-up.

The GCS variant was worse: bws && sws; ros2 launch ... — after a failed build it skipped sourcing but still ran the launch.

What changed

Both bind-mounted .bashrc files (robot/docker/.bashrc, gcs/docker/.bashrc) gain an autolaunch() helper that runs build → source → launch and prints an unmissable banner when a stage fails:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  AUTOLAUNCH FAILED on <hostname> (ROBOT_NAME=robot_1)
  colcon build (bws) failed — the stack was NOT launched
  Scroll up in this tmux pane (airstack connect) or 'airstack logs'
  for the first error.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
AUTOLAUNCH FAILED: colcon build (bws) failed — the stack was NOT launched

Red/white ANSI banner plus a plain-text repeat (for ANSI-stripping log processors); the tmux output-mirroring hooks carry it into docker logs / airstack logs. A nonzero ros2 launch exit gets the same treatment ("the stack is DOWN", with the exit code).

The compose autolaunch commands now use it:

File	Services
robot/docker/docker-compose.yaml	robot-desktop (and everything extending it), robot-voxl-onboard, robot-l4t
gcs/docker/gcs-base-docker-compose.yaml	gcs (also fixes the bws && sws; ros2 launch mis-chain that launched unsourced after a failed build)

The zed camera service keeps its own chain — it mounts a separate bashrc and is camera-only.

Since the .bashrcs are bind-mounted, the change takes effect on next container start with no image rebuild. VERSION bumped 0.20.0-alpha.10 → 0.20.0-alpha.11; release-notes Changed bullet added.

Validation

• Helper unit-tested with stubbed bws/sws/ros2: build failure → banner + rc=1 + no launch attempt; launch exiting 42 → banner + rc=42; success → no banner, rc=0.
• bash -n on both .bashrcs; YAML parse on both compose files.
• Live check pending: next airstack up with a deliberately broken package should show the banner in airstack logs.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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