AutoBashCraft – a tool for automated Markdown screencast generation

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AutoBashCraft – a tool for automated Markdown screencast generation

Hello HN, Around New Year's I started a personal project called AutoBashCraft (ABC), aiming to simplify the creation of screencasts from bash code blocks in markdown files. I needed to create a lot of markdown files explaining workflows and code. I wanted to make the text-heavy files more interesting and thought of screencasts. There are many great tools to record terminal sessions. Then I found the asciinema-rec-script ( https://github.com/zechris/asciinema-rec_script ) by Chris Ottrey that creates screencasts of bash scripts that look like a record of a terminal session including typing out the commands. I wanted the markdown files to be the same documents you would use as training or documentation material so I picked HTML comments to mark the codeblocks that are supposed to be executed. It would then execute the commands and save the screencast next to the markdown file in an asset folder so they can be easily embedded just under the codeblock. I went on from there and more commands were added such as 'create' to create a file with the contents of the codeblock, 'browse' to create a screenshot of a website, 'spawn' to spawn a background process, 'snapshot' to create a docker container of the current environment state, 'init' to initialize a new environment e.g. from a snapshot created in another file and 'config' to change configuration for the following commands. ABC is very much a work-in-progress and a proof of concept at this stage. I am also thinking of adding an editor to create a similar experience to jupyter notebooks, with automatic snapshots between each command in dev mode. There is so much work left to be done but for now I am back at my day job. The repository includes some examples that also work as (currently manually executed tests) including more complex workflows like automating MBTiles generation and usage or integrating private GPT, showcasing what I hope it can become. Running it is as simple as using NPX, with Docker and Node.js being the only requirements. Please only run your code or code you trust (esp. with docker activated). I later realized it also serves as a validator for the accuracy of instructional content. It happens so often that training material is missing important steps and it is very frustrating for beginners to follow a guide step by step and it just won't work. I'd be incredibly grateful if you could take a moment to check it out on GitHub, give it a star if you find it interesting, and maybe even contribute or fork it. I'm looking forward to your feedback and suggestions. Let's make something great together! Links: https://github.com/autobashcraft/cli https://github.com/autobashcraft/cli/blob/main/examples/mbti... https://github.com/autobashcraft/cli/blob/main/examples/priv... https://github.com/autobashcraft/cli/blob/main/examples/priv... https://github.com/autobashcraft/cli/blob/main/examples/priv...