bag_recorder

Interactive ROS bag recorder with topic selection for ROS 1 and ROS 2.

Streamline your ROS bag recording workflow with an intuitive terminal UI designed to make topic selection quick and effortless.

✨ Features

• Interactive Topic Selection: Choose topics to record with a scrollable checklist interface
• ROS 1 & ROS 2 Support: Automatically detects your ROS version and uses the appropriate commands
• Topic Filtering: Excludes common system topics (/rosout, /rosout_agg, /parameter_events) by default
• Selection Memory: Remembers your last selection (including process indices) for faster setup on subsequent runs
• Per-Process Grouping: Assign topics to different record processes with left/right keys
• Scrollable Interface: Handles large topic lists with visual scroll indicators

📋 Requirements

• ROS 1 or ROS 2
• uv - Modern Python package and project manager

⚡ Quick Start

uv tool install git+https://github.com/mitukou1109/bag_recorder
record-bag

📖 Usage

Basic Usage

record-bag

With Options

Pass additional options to the bag record command:

record-bag -a -o /path/to/output

Interactive Controls

• ↑/↓: Navigate through topics
• Space: Toggle topic selection
• ←/→: Change process index for the selected topic (checked only)
• Enter: Start recording selected topics
• Ctrl+C: Cancel and exit

Upgrade

To upgrade to the latest version, run:

uv tool upgrade bag_recorder

🛠️ Implementation Details

Process Index

Each checked topic has a process index (shown before the topic name) that determines which rosbag/ros2 bag process it belongs to.

• Topics with the same index are recorded by the same process.
• Indices are always contiguous among checked topics (1..N).
• Unchecked topics show [-] (no index assigned).

Bag Naming

When multiple processes are used, the tool ensures unique bag names per process.

• ROS 1 default: YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS-{index}.bag
• ROS 2 default: rosbag2_YYYY_MM_DD-HH_MM_SS-{index}
• With -o/-O: the provided name gets -{index} appended