Installation

There are several ways to get asciinema recorder:

• Installing via Pip
• Installing on Linux
• Installing on macOS
• Installing on FreeBSD
• Installing on OpenBSD
• Running in a container
• Running from source

If you use other operating system and you can build a native package for it then don’t hesitate, do it and let us know. We have Github issue where we track new releases and packaging progress.

Installing via Pip

asciinema is available on PyPI and can be installed with pip (Python 3 required):

sudo pip3 install asciinema

This is the universal installation method for all operating systems, which always provides the latest version.

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

Homebrew

brew install asciinema

MacPorts

sudo port selfupdate && sudo port install asciinema

Nix

nix-env -i asciinema

Installing on FreeBSD

Ports

cd /usr/ports/textproc/py-asciinema && make install

Packages

pkg install py39-asciinema

Installing on OpenBSD

pkg_add asciinema

Running in a container

asciinema Docker image is based on Ubuntu 22.04 and has the latest version of asciinema recorder pre-installed.

docker pull ghcr.io/asciinema/asciinema

When running it don’t forget to allocate a pseudo-TTY (-t), keep STDIN open (-i) and mount config directory volume (-v):

docker run --rm -it -v "${HOME}/.config/asciinema:/root/.config/asciinema" ghcr.io/asciinema/asciinema rec

Container’s entrypoint is set to /usr/local/bin/asciinema so you can run the container with any arguments you would normally pass to asciinema binary (see Usage section for commands and options).

There’s not much software installed in this image though. In most cases you may want to install extra programs before recording. One option is to derive new image from this one (start your custom Dockerfile with FROM ghcr.io/asciinema/asciinema). Another option is to start the container with /bin/bash as the entrypoint, install extra packages and manually start asciinema rec:

docker run --rm -it -v "${HOME}/.config/asciinema:/root/.config/asciinema" --entrypoint=/bin/bash ghcr.io/asciinema/asciinema rec
root@6689517d99a1:~# apt-get install foobar
root@6689517d99a1:~# asciinema rec

It is also possible to run the docker container as a non-root user, which has security benefits. You can specify a user and group id at runtime to give the application permission similar to the calling user on your host.

docker run --rm -it \
    --env=ASCIINEMA_CONFIG_HOME="/run/user/$(id -u)/.config/asciinema" \
    --user="$(id -u):$(id -g)" \
    --volume="${HOME}/.config/asciinema:/run/user/$(id -u)/.config/asciinema:rw" \
    --volume="${PWD}:/data:rw" \
    --workdir='/data' \
    ghcr.io/asciinema/asciinema rec

Running from source

If none of the above works for you (or you want to help with development) just clone the repo and run latest version of asciinema straight from the main branch:

git clone https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema.git
cd asciinema
git checkout main
python3 -m asciinema --version