Introduction

Rewire is a standalone Rust binary that connects to your ROS 2 network via DDS and Zenoh, discovers topics automatically, and streams them to the Rerun viewer in real time.

No ROS 2 runtime required. No colcon builds. No workspace sourcing (unless you need URDF mesh resolution).

ROS 2 nodes <--DDS/Zenoh--> Rewire <--convert--> Rerun Viewer

Quick install

curl -fsSL https://rewire.run/install.sh | sh

Quick start

rewire record --all                          # Subscribe to all discovered topics
rewire record --topics /camera/image /odom   # Subscribe to specific topics
rewire record --connect 127.0.0.1:9876       # Connect to remote Rerun viewer
rewire record --save recording.rrd           # Save to file

What you get

• 56 built-in type mappings — images, pointclouds, TF, poses, laser scans, odometry, and more
• Custom message mappings — map any ROS 2 type to Rerun archetypes via JSON5 config
• URDF + TF tree — automatic robot model visualization with full transform tree
• Per-topic diagnostics — Hz, bandwidth, drops, and latency as Rerun entities
• DDS and Zenoh — speaks both protocols simultaneously
• WebSocket API — stream live data to any client over WebSocket
• Topic filtering — glob patterns for include/exclude
• IPC control — runtime recording management via Unix sockets
• Covariance visualization — 1-sigma ellipsoids for pose uncertainty
• Auto-update — rewire upgrade for self-update