Terminal session recorder, streamer and player 📹

asciinema

asciinema (aka asciinema CLI or asciinema recorder) is a command-line tool
for recording and live streaming terminal sessions.

Unlike typical screen recording software, which records visual output of a
screen into a heavyweight video files (.mp4, .mov), asciinema CLI runs
inside a terminal, capturing terminal session output into a lightweight
recording files in the
asciicast format (.cast),
or streaming it live to viewers in real-time.

The recordings can be replayed in a terminal, embedded on a web page with the
asciinema player, or published to
an asciinema server, such as
asciinema.org, for further sharing. Live streams allow
viewers to watch terminal sessions as they happen.

asciinema runs on GNU/Linux, macOS and FreeBSD.

<a href="https://asciinema.org/a/756853?autoplay=1"><img src="https://asciinema.org/a/756853.svg" alt="asciinema CLI demo" width="100%" /></a>

Notable features:

• recording and replaying of sessions inside a terminal,
• local and remote live
  streaming
  of terminal sessions to multiple viewers in real-time,
• lightweight recording
  format, which is highly
  compressible (down to 15% of the original size e.g. with zstd or gzip),
• integration with asciinema
  server, e.g.
  asciinema.org, for easy recording hosting and live
  streaming.

To record a session run this command in your shell:

SH
asciinema rec demo.cast  

To stream a session via built-in HTTP server run:

SH
asciinema stream -l  

To stream a session via a relay (asciinema server) run:

SH
asciinema stream -r  

Check out the Getting started
guide for installation and usage
overview.

Building

Building asciinema from source requires the Rust
compiler (1.82 or later), and the Cargo package
manager. If they are not available via your
system package manager then use rustup.

To download the source code, build the asciinema binary, and install it in
$HOME/.cargo/bin in one go run:

SH
cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema  

Then, ensure $HOME/.cargo/bin is in your shell's $PATH.

Alternatively, you can manually download the source code and build the asciinema
binary with:

SH
git clone https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema  
cd asciinema  
cargo build --release  

This produces the binary at target/release/asciinema. You can just copy the
binary to a directory in your $PATH.

To generate man pages and shell completion files, set ASCIINEMA_GEN_DIR to the
path where these artifacts should be stored. For example:

SH
ASCIINEMA_GEN_DIR=/foo cargo build --release  

The above command will build the binary and place the man pages in /foo/man/,
and the shell completion files in the /foo/completion/ directory.

[!NOTE]
Windows is currently not supported. See #467.
You can try PowerSession instead.

Development

All development happens on develop branch. This branch contains the current
generation (3.x) of the asciinema CLI, written in Rust.

The previous generation (2.x), written in Python, can be found in the python
branch.

If you wish to propose non-trivial code changes, please first reach out to the
team via forum,
Matrix or
IRC.

Donations

Sustainability of asciinema development relies on donations and sponsorships.

If you like the project then consider becoming a
supporter or a corporate
sponsor.

asciinema is sponsored by:

• Brightbox

Consulting

If you're interested in integration or customization of asciinema to suit your
needs, check asciinema consulting
services.

License

© 2011 Marcin Kulik.

All code is licensed under the GPL, v3 or later. See LICENSE file
for details.

Source: https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema