TermRecord: Terminal Screencast in a Self-Contained HTML File

 Posted on May 19, 2014  |  Dusty Mabe

Introduction


Some time ago I wrote a few posts ( 1, 2 ) on how to use script to record a terminal session and then scriptreplay to play it back. This functionality can be very useful by enabling you the power to show others what happens when you do insert anything here.

I have been happy with this solution for a while until one day Wolfgang Richter commented on my original post and shared a project he has been working on known as TermRecord.

I gave it a spin and have been using it quite a bit. Sharing a terminal recording now becomes much easier as you can simply email the .html file or you can host it yourself and share links. As long the people you are sharing with have a browser then they can watch the playback. Thus, it is not tied to a system with a particular piece of software and clicking a link to view is very easy to do :)

Basics of TermRecord


Before anything else we need to install TermRecord. Currently TermRecord is available in the python package index (hopefully will be packaged in some major distributions soon) and can be installed using pip.\

[root@localhost ~]# pip install TermRecord
Downloading/unpacking TermRecord
  Downloading TermRecord-1.1.3.tar.gz (49kB): 49kB downloaded
  Running setup.py egg_info for package TermRecord
...
...
Successfully installed TermRecord Jinja2 markupsafe
Cleaning up...

Now you can make a self-contained html file for sharing in a couple of ways.

First, you can use TermRecord to convert already existing timing and log files that were created using the script command by specifying them as inputs to TermRecord:\

[root@localhost ~]# TermRecord -o screencast.html -t screencast.timing -s screencast.log


The other option is to create a new recording using TermRecord like so:\

[root@localhost ~]# TermRecord -o screencast.html 
Script started, file is /tmp/tmp5I4SYq
[root@localhost ~]# 
[root@localhost ~]# #This is a screencast.
[root@localhost ~]# exit
exit
Script done, file is /tmp/tmp5I4SYq


And.. Done. Now you can email or share the html file any way you like. If you would like to see some examples of terminal recordings you can check out the TermRecord github page or here is one from my previous post on wordpress/docker.

Cheers,
Dusty