How to use asciinema offline?

Question

How can I record and play asciinema screen recordings in a LAN without internet connection?

The tool uploads the recordings per default to the asciinema website but I want to keep it local and run the player on a local webserver.

Answer 1

Just pass asciinema rec a file name as an argument, in which case it will simply save the recording to the local file and not try to upload it to the server. For example:

$ asciinema rec demo.cast

You can then play the recording locally (on the terminal) with:

$ asciinema play demo.cast

And finally upload it with:

$ asciinema upload demo.cast

See the asciinema usage docs for more details on each of these.

You mentioned hosting the recording in your own server. In that case, you might want to look at setting your own asciinema web app instance, which you need to run on your server in order to host screencasts you upload. That page has a link to the web app install guide (which by default runs in a Docker container.) Once you have that up and running, you can configure your local asciinema to upload to your server rather than the public one in asciinema.org.

Alternatively, you can simply host the asciinema player along with the *.cast files in a webserver and embed them directly into an HTML page, which sounds like you are looking for, as there is no asciinema upload step involved. See these instructions for standalone usage of the asciinema-player app.