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README.md

C++ implementation of the MCAP file format

Example writer

#define MCAP_IMPLEMENTATION  // Define this in exactly one .cpp file
#include <mcap/writer.hpp>

#include <chrono>
#include <cstring>
#include <iostream>

// Returns the system time in nanoseconds. std::chrono is used here, but any
// high resolution clock API (such as clock_gettime) can be used.
mcap::Timestamp now() {
  return mcap::Timestamp(std::chrono::duration_cast<std::chrono::nanoseconds>(
                           std::chrono::system_clock::now().time_since_epoch())
                           .count());
}

int main() {
  // Initialize an MCAP writer with the "ros1" profile and write the file header
  mcap::McapWriter writer;
  auto status = writer.open("output.mcap", mcap::McapWriterOptions("ros1"));
  if (!status.ok()) {
    std::cerr << "Failed to open MCAP file for writing: " << status.message << "\n";
    return 1;
  }

  // Register a Schema
  mcap::Schema stdMsgsString("std_msgs/String", "ros1msg", "string data");
  writer.addSchema(stdMsgsString);

  // Register a Channel
  mcap::Channel chatterPublisher("/chatter", "ros1", stdMsgsString.id);
  writer.addChannel(chatterPublisher);

  // Create a message payload. This would typically be done by your own
  // serialization library. In this example, we manually create ROS1 binary data
  std::array<std::byte, 4 + 13> payload;
  const uint32_t length = 13;
  std::memcpy(payload.data(), &length, 4);
  std::memcpy(payload.data() + 4, "Hello, world!", 13);

  // Write our message
  mcap::Message msg;
  msg.channelId = chatterPublisher.id;
  msg.sequence = 1; // Optional
  msg.logTime = now(); // Required nanosecond timestamp
  msg.publishTime = msg.logTime; // Set to logTime if not available
  msg.data = payload.data();
  msg.dataSize = payload.size();
  writer.write(msg);

  // Finish writing the file
  writer.close();
}

Building

Run make to build the library using a Docker container. This requires Docker to be installed, and will produce Linux (ELF) binaries compiled in an Ubuntu container with the clang compiler. If you want to build binaries for another platform or using your own compiler, run make build-host. This requires a working C++ compiler toolchain and Conan to be installed.

Output binaries can be found in:

  • cpp/bench/build/Release/bin/,
  • cpp/examples/build/Release/bin/
  • cpp/test/build/Debug/bin/.

Including in your project

The C++ implementation of MCAP is maintained as a header-only library with the following dependencies:

If your project does not need lz4 or zstd support, you can optionally disable these by defining MCAP_COMPRESSION_NO_LZ4 or MCAP_COMPRESSION_NO_ZSTD respectively.

To simplify installation of dependencies, the Conan package manager can be used with the included conanfile.py. If you use an alternative approach, such as CMake's FetchContent or directly vendoring the dependencies, make sure you use versions equal or greater than the versions listed above.

Usage

Refer to the API documentation in mcap/mcap.hpp for full details. The high-level interfaces for reading and writing are McapReader and McapWriter.

Releasing new versions

  1. Update the #define MCAP_LIBRARY_VERSION and all other occurrences of the same version number, e.g. in conanfile.py, build.sh, and others.
  2. Once the version number has been updated, create and push a git tag named releases/cpp/vX.Y.Z matching the new version number.
  3. Make a pull request to conan-io/conan-center-index to update the mcap recipe:

Changes to APIs

This project uses a semantic version number to notify users of changes to public APIs. This semantic version can be read from types.hpp, defined as MCAP_LIBRARY_VERSION.

The public API includes names that can be included from the .hpp files in include/mcap, excluding anything namespaced under mcap::internal.

This API version does not cover the compiled ABI of the library. Projects including mcap are expected to compile it from source as part of their build process.

Build rules in CMake or conanfile.py files are not covered as part of this public API.