Installation#

This page describes how to install Isaac Lab Arena from source inside a Docker container.

Supported Systems#

Isaac Lab Arena runs on Isaac Sim 5.1.0 and Isaac Lab 2.3.0. The dependencies are installed automatically during the Docker build process. Hardware requirements for Isaac Lab Arena are shared with Isaac Sim, and are detailed in Isaac Sim Requirements.

GR00T fine-tuning: Our example workflows include (optional) fine-tuning of the GR00T model. These workflows have additional requirements, notably that they do not support Blackwell GPUs, and require large amounts of GPU memory. Specific additional requirements for GR00T fine-tuning are detailed in the respective workflow pages.

Installation via Docker#

Isaac Lab Arena supports installation from source inside a Docker container. Future versions of Isaac Lab Arena, we will support a larger range of installation options.

  1. Clone the repository and initialize submodules:

git clone git@github.com:isaac-sim/IsaacLab-Arena.git

git submodule update --init --recursive

  1. Launch the docker container:

./docker/run_docker.sh

for more details see Docker Containers.

  1. Optionally verify installation by running tests:

pytest -sv -m with_cameras isaaclab_arena/tests/ --ignore=isaaclab_arena/tests/policy/
pytest -sv -m "not with_cameras" isaaclab_arena/tests/ --ignore=isaaclab_arena/tests/policy/

With isaaclab_arena installed and the docker running, you’re ready to build your first IsaacLab-Arena Environment. See First Arena Environment to get started.

Omniverse Authentication (Use of Internal Assets)#

To allow the project to access Nvidia Omniverse assets or services (e.g., stored scenes, USD files, or extensions on a Nucleus server), you must authenticate using an Omniverse API token.

Todo

This is only needed for assets that are not yet hosted on the public Nucleus server. Once we go public, this will not be needed. TODO(cvolk, 2025-11-03): Remove this once we have public assets.

Isaac Sim and other Nvidia Omniverse applications use two environment variables OMNI_USER and OMNI_PASS to authenticate automatically.

To generate those, follow the instructions on the Omniverse Authentication documentation.

export OMNI_USER='$omni-api-token'
export OMNI_PASS=<your_generated_api_token>

Where:

  • OMNI_USER should be set to the literal string $omni-api-token (including the leading dollar sign)

  • OMNI_PASS should be the actual token value you generated.