Install mcap with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• mcap

Project history

Foxglove's official documentation presents MCAP as a container format for pub/sub messages with a formal specification, language libraries, and a CLI. The GitHub release history shows the mcap-cli release stream beginning publicly in 2022, alongside the broader effort to make robotics logs easier to inspect outside one vendor or middleware stack.

By 2026 the CLI had advanced to a v0.2.x release line, and the official release notes identify the CLI as rewritten in Rust. That kind of implementation change matters for package managers because it affects build dependencies, binary distribution, and performance expectations.

Adoption history

MCAP adoption is strongest in robotics and observability workflows around Foxglove and ROS. The official documentation includes guides for getting started, the formal spec, and ecosystem integrations, while Homebrew packages the mcap executable as a convenient desktop and CI tool.

Unlike many robotics formats, MCAP was designed to be serialization-agnostic from the start. That made it attractive for package ecosystems because one CLI can inspect, validate, convert, and filter logs produced by different message schemas.

How it is used

Users install the mcap CLI to inspect metadata, validate files, recover or convert logs, and pipe message data into other tooling. Developers use the spec and language libraries when they need to produce or consume MCAP files directly from robots, simulations, or data pipelines.

The format is especially useful when logs must be archived, replayed, or shared between teams without assuming a single serializer or runtime.

Why package nerds care

MCAP is package-nerd significant because it turns a robotics logging format into a normal command-line artifact. Having a Homebrew formula for mcap lets developers inspect large log files on laptops without installing an entire robotics distribution.

It also represents a newer class of packages where the file format, spec site, libraries, and CLI are all part of one developer-facing artifact.

Timeline

• 2022: Public mcap-cli GitHub releases began.
• 2022: The CLI release stream iterated rapidly through early v0.0.x versions.
• 2026: mcap-cli v0.1.0 and v0.2.0 releases were published, with v0.1.0 described as a Rust rewrite.
• 2026: Homebrew packages the mcap command for local log inspection and conversion workflows.

Related projects

• Related projects include Foxglove, ROS bags, rosbag2, Protobuf, FlatBuffers, JSON Schema, and robotics telemetry tools that need durable log containers.

Sources

• https://github.com/foxglove/mcap
• https://github.com/foxglove/mcap/releases
• https://mcap.dev/
• https://mcap.dev/guides/getting-started
• https://mcap.dev/spec
• source_facts.package-manager