shelr, broadcast your Linux shell on the net

Thanks to Edmond, i’ve found a new and interesting online service shelr.tv.
Shelr.tv allows you to record something interesting from your terminal and share it to your followers.

It is almost the same thing as YouTube but for plain text shellcasts. You can copy and paste everything you see.
The nice thing is that you can play the shellcasts back directly on your terminal or in a browser from their website, and when uploading them you can decide to make them public or private.

Installation

The program is made in Ruby and is available as package for Ubuntu (ppa), Arch, Gentoo or directly as Ruby gem.
I’ve tested their PPA and on my ubuntu 11.10 this didn’t work, it install nicely but when you try to run the command it exit for missing ruby dependency.

So my suggestion is to install rubygems and than install shelr as gem:

sudo aptitude install rubygems
sudo gem install shelr

Installing shelr in this way work perfectly, I’ve also registered an username on the site (you can also connect a Twitter or Google account) and to connect that account locally you can give the command:

shelr setup 75a8278110a010b18a022f74063fd

This is a fake key, once you registered the website will tell your key.

Basic usage

Shelr is really easy to be used, to start a recording session just open your terminal and write

root@xubuntu-home:~# shelr record

You’ll get an output like this one:

Saved terminal size 142X43
Provide HUMAN NAME for Your shellcast: Linuxaria Article
/root/.local/share/shelr/1335023506/meta
 ____                        _ _             
|  _  ___  ___ ___  _ __ __| (_)_ __   __ _ 
| |_) / _ / __/ _ | '__/ _` | | '_  / _` |
|  _ < __/ (_| (_) | | | (_| | | | | | (_| |
|_| ____|______/|_|  __,_|_|_| |_|__, |
                                       |___/ 
Your session started
Type Ctrl+D or exit to finish recording
Script started, file is /root/.local/share/shelr/1335023506/typescript
root@xubuntu-home:~#

Now you can start to write whatever you want on your terminal and everything will be recorded with also a file for the timing so when you’ll playback it you’ll see an exact copy of what you have done, to finish the session just hit Ctrl+D and you’ll get an output like this one:

root@xubuntu-home:~# exit
Script done, file is /root/.local/share/shelr/1335023506/typescript
 _____ _       _     _              _ 
|  ___(_)_ __ (_)___| |__   ___  __| |
| |_  | | '_ | / __| '_  / _ / _` |
|  _| | | | | | __  | | |  __/ (_| |
|_|   |_|_| |_|_|___/_| |_|___|__,_|
 
 
hint $ shelr play 1335023506
hint $ shelr push 1335023506

This introduces the other 2 useful commands for shelr, play and push.
Giving from the terminal shelr play ID you’ll see on your terminal the playback of your session ID, if you don’t remember the ID you can also use the command shelr list that shows all your saved session:

root@xubuntu-home:~# shelr list
1335024395: Linuxaria Article

And at last, once you have produced a great new shellcast you can upload it on the website with the command shelr push ID, that will ask you for a description of the upload and tags:

root@xubuntu-home:~# shelr list
1335024395: Linuxaria Article
root@xubuntu-home:~# shelr push 1335024395
Description: Shelr test for linuxaria.com article
Tags (ex: howto, linux): linux,shelr,expect
Record published!
http://shelr.tv/records/4f92dd04966080032d00002c

Perfect now all the world can see this great shellcast with the command:

shelr play http://shelr.tv/records/4f92dd04966080032d00002c.json

Note: you have to add the .json to the url that you got from the shelr push
Or you can go on the website and play it on your browser

Conclusions

The idea is really simple but i think that can be really useful to share tutorial, shell output and many things, for sure i’m thinking to use this site to register some tutorial and command used in my articles.

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