Docs

Sharing & embedding

You can share any recording by copying its URL and sending it to a friend or posting it on a social network. asciinema.org supports oEmbed/Open Graph/Twitter Card protocols, displaying a nice thumbnail where possible.

You can also easily embed an asciicast on any HTML page. If you want to put a recording in a blog post, a project’s documentation or in a conference talk’s slides, you can do it by copy-pasting one of the embed scripts.

Sharing a link

You can get the share link for a specific asciicast by clicking on “Share” link on asciicast page.

Any of the options listed in “Customizing the playback” section below can be appended to the asciicast URL as the query params, e.g.:

https://asciinema.org/a/14?t=25&speed=2&theme=solarized-dark

Visiting this link will start the playback at 25s and play at double speed, using Solarized Dark terminal theme.

Embedding image link

Embedding as an image link is useful in places where scripts are not allowed, e.g. in a project’s README file.

You can get the embed snippets for a specific asciicast by clicking on “Share” link on asciicast page.

This is how they look for asciicast 14:

HTML:

<a href="https://asciinema.org/a/14"><img src="https://asciinema.org/a/14.png" width="836"/></a>

Markdown:

[![asciicast](https://asciinema.org/a/14.png)](https://asciinema.org/a/14)

You can pass extra options (listed in “Customizing the playback” below) to the linked URL as query params. For example, to start the playback automatically when opening linked asciicast page append ?autoplay=1 to the asciicast URL in href attribute:

<a href="https://asciinema.org/a/14?autoplay=1"><img src="https://asciinema.org/a/14.png" width="836"/></a>

Embedding the player

If you’re embedding on your own page or on a site which permits script tags, you can use the full player widget.

You can get the widget script for a specific asciicast by clicking on “Embed” link on asciicast page.

It looks like this:

<script src="https://asciinema.org/a/14.js" id="asciicast-14" async></script>

The player shows up right at the place where the script is pasted. Let’s look at the following markup:

<p>This is some text.</p>
<script src="https://asciinema.org/a/14.js" id="asciicast-14" async></script>
<p>This is some other text.</p>

The player is displayed between the two paragraphs, as a div element with “asciicast” class.

The embed script supports all customization options (see the section below). An option can be specified by adding it as a

data-option-name="value"

tag.

For example, to make the embedded player autostart playback when loaded and use big font, use the following script:

<script src="https://asciinema.org/a/14.js" id="asciicast-14" async data-autoplay="true" data-size="big"></script>

Customizing the playback

The player supports several options that control the behavior and look of it. Append them to the URL (?speed=2&theme=tango) or set them as data attributes on embed script (data-speed="2" data-theme="tango").

startAt / t

The startAt (or t) option specifies the time at which the playback should start. The default is startAt=0 (play from the beginning).

Accepted formats: ss, mm:ss, hh:mm:ss.

NOTE: when startAt is specified then autoplay=1 is implied. To prevent the player from starting automatically when startAt option is set you have to explicitly set autoplay=0.

autoplay

The autoplay option controls whether the playback should automatically start when the player loads. Accepted values:

  • 0 / false - do not start playback automatically (default)
  • 1 / true - start playback automatically

preload

The preload option controls whether the player should immediately start fetching the recording.

  • 0 / false - do not preload the recording, wait for user action
  • 1 / true - preload the recording

Defaults to 1 for asciinema.org URLs, to 0 for embed script.

loop

The loop option allows for looping the playback. This option is usually combined with autoplay option. Accepted values:

  • 0 / false - disable looping (default)
  • 1 / true - enable looping

speed

The speed option alters the playback speed. The default speed is 1 which means it plays at the unaltered, original speed.

idleTimeLimit / i

The idleTimeLimit (or i) option allows reducing terminal inactivity periods to a given number of seconds.

For example, when set to 2 any inactivity longer than 2 seconds will be “compressed” to 2 seconds.

When not specified it defaults to (first non-blank):

  • the “Idle time limit” value set on asciicast’s settings page,
  • idle_time_limit value from asciicast header (saved when passing -i <sec> to asciinema rec),
  • no limit, when it was not specified at the time of recording.

theme

The theme option allows overriding a theme used for the terminal. It defaults to a theme set by the asciicast author (or to “asciinema” if not set by the author). The available themes are:

  • asciinema
  • monokai
  • nord
  • solarized-dark
  • solarized-light
  • tango

cols

The cols option allows overriding width (in characters) of the emulated terminal. By default the recorded terminal’s width is used.

rows

The rows option allows overriding height (in lines) of the emulated terminal. By default the recorded terminal’s height is used.

oEmbed / Open Graph / Twitter Card

asciinema supports oEmbed, Open Graph and Twitter Card APIs. When you share an asciicast on Twitter, Slack, Facebook, Google+ or any other site which supports one of these APIs, the asciicast is presented in a rich form (usually with a title, author, description and a thumbnail image), linking to your recording on asciinema.org.