Recording terminal sessions with asciinema

Asciinema is a simple, but powerful tool that we can use to record our terminal sessions, in other words we can make “videos” of what we are doing on the command line and share it with others.

How does it work? Asciinema is a session recorder, web player and a website that work together to provide a way to record, share and play terminal sessions. This session recording captures our terminal output, so it is not the same as screen-recording which produces video. After we record a session, we are presented with an option to upload it to asciinema.org or to save it locally. With asciinema online account we can easily manage our uploaded recordings and share them. By default the recordings are not listed on the website, but are available on the secret URL that we can share. We can also make them completely public if we want to.

To start using Asciinema we will need to install it first. Many installation options make it really easy. On Fedora, the familiar sudo dnf install asciinema will do the trick. To create online account, we only need to enter our email address here: https://asciinema.org/login/new.

With the command line tool installed and our account ready to go, all it takes now is to type:

asciinema auth
asciinema rec

Recording can be ended with “CTRL+D” combo.

And that’s all! After the recording is done, we just select if we want to upload it straight away or not, pair it with an account and possibly share online. For people oriented more towards self-hosting than cloud, there is an article about self-hosting asciinema if we want to distribute the content ourselves.

Besides making our own recordings, we can also browse what other people created on asciinema.org.

I think that asciinema is a neat tool and I am looking forward to using it for tutorials and documentation. Maybe it can help you as well!

Last updated on 14.12.2019.