How to Properly Document Terminal Outputs: Asciinema Install & Setup

Asciinema is one of the best bits of software I’ve seen recently for frequent terminal users. It’s goal is simple: Make recording simple, available on any machine, and share quicker than normal videos. It does that, and it even allows for embedding on sites, like I did with my k6 setup guide.

Install #

Installing on Linux #

Arch Linux

pacman -S asciinema

Debian

sudo apt-get install asciinema

Fedora For Fedora < 22:

sudo yum install asciinema

For Fedora >= 22:

sudo dnf install asciinema

Gentoo Linux

emerge -av asciinema

NixOS / Nix

nix-env -i asciinema

openSUSE

zypper in asciinema

Ubuntu

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:zanchey/asciinema
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install asciinema

Installing on MacOS #

Using Homebrew:

brew install asciinema

Sadly, there’s no Windows edition here, but you can install via python using pip3 install asciinema .

Command Usage & Example #

# Used to start the record
asciinema rec

Then, either press CTRL+D or type exit in the console.

This will then give you the option to either save locally as a .cast file, or to share on the asciinema website. This’ll generate a handy link to send to whoever you’d like. Here’s one I made earlier!

If you’re anything like me, this’ll make you think of quite a few docs written here and there you can go back to and show really what a command output should look like without strange text formatting. The only thing I wish is that you could live stream your terminal using this. Now that would make shadowing sessions much better.