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asciinema/asciinema-server

★ 2,482 · Elixir · Apache-2.0 · updated Jul 2026

Platform for hosting and sharing terminal session recordings

The server-side component of the asciinema ecosystem — handles uploading, hosting, and playback of terminal session recordings in asciicast format, plus live terminal streaming. It's what runs asciinema.org, and you can self-host it if you don't want your terminal sessions on someone else's box.

Full-text search that indexes the actual terminal content, not just titles — that's genuinely useful and technically nontrivial. Live streaming via WebSockets with proper stream state bookkeeping through a virtual terminal emulator (avt) is a real feature, not a demo. The storage layer is pluggable (local or S3), and the background job architecture using Oban covers the async work — snapshot generation, file compression, FTS reindexing — cleanly without rolling a custom queue. Self-hosting story is solid: Docker, Nix flake, docker-compose dev setup, documented runtime config.

Elixir is the right call for this (concurrency, WebSockets, fault tolerance), but it's a hard dependency that narrows who can realistically run and maintain a self-hosted instance — most teams don't have Elixir expertise. The admin UI is barebones; there's no real content moderation tooling, which matters if you're running a public instance. No OAuth or SSO — login is email magic-link only, which will block adoption in enterprise or team contexts. The oEmbed support exists but SVG previews are generated by rasterizing through a headless browser path, which adds operational complexity for anyone wanting rich embeds.

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