Support server URLs without appended file extension

[tomas]

Hi, I'm trying to run asciicast2gif against a recording I just posted online, but I'm getting the following output:

==> Loading https://asciinema.org/a/AsPWpL1qCvInbNAAVBfbDfRhy...
only asciicast v1 and v2 formats can be opened
==> Done.

Running locally it doesn't work, as well:

==> Loading /tmp/tmpi1soul1l-ascii.cast...
==> Spawning PhantomJS renderer...
==> Generating frame screenshots...
==> Couldn't get geometry of requested DOM element
/usr/local/lib/node/lib/node_modules/asciicast2gif/main.js:696
[ ... ]

Any pointers? Thanks!

[funilrys]

:+1: I get the same here ...

[tomas]

Ping @sickill :)

[dhimmel]

I got the same error message when passing an asciinema.org URL. However, after looking into it, there doesn't appear to be a version 3 of the asciicast format and when I run asciinema --version locally, it showed I have version 2.0.0 which should be using the asciicast v2 format.

Hence, I realized we're just passing URLs that don't resolve to asciicast files. If you append .cast to the asciinema.org URL, then asciicast2gif should work. Try:

asciicast2gif https://asciinema.org/a/AsPWpL1qCvInbNAAVBfbDfRhy.cast output.gif

Perhaps a better error message in this case or support for asciinema.org URLs would be good enhancements.

[berkant]

@dhimmel It didn't work for me.

[dhimmel]

It didn't work for me.

It would be helpful to see the command you ran and the output that was provided.

[ku1ik]

@dhimmel is correct, right now you need to add .cast (or .json) ext to the URL, since asciicast2gif can't resolve it.

It would definitely be nice if it happened automatically. I plan to work on better content-type negotiation support on server side, this should solve this case then.

[Xtigyro]

It doesn't seem to work:

~/repos/xtigyro/deploy-kubernetes-kind # asciicast2gif https://asciinema.org/a/348726.cast demo.gif
==> Loading https://asciinema.org/a/348726.cast...
==> Spawning PhantomJS renderer...
/usr/local/lib/node_modules/asciicast2gif/main.js:697
Qe)}function ep(a){try{var b=a[0];return b.h?b.h(a):b.call(null,a)}catch(c){if(c instanceof Object)throw b=c,Yo(a[6]),b;throw c;}}function fp(a,b,c){c=Zo(c,dp(function(c){a[2]=c;a[1]=b;return ep(a)}));return r(c)?(a[2]=Nb(c),a[1]=b,dj):null}function gp(a,b){a=a[6];null!=b&&a.Dc(null,b,dp(function(){return function(){return null}}(a)));Yo(a);return a}
                                                                                                   ^

TypeError [ERR_INVALID_ARG_TYPE]: The "file" argument must be of type string. Received type object
    at validateString (internal/validators.js:125:11)
    at normalizeSpawnArguments (child_process.js:411:3)
    at spawn (child_process.js:545:16)
    at Function.exports.exec (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/asciicast2gif/node_modules/phantomjs-prebuilt/lib/phantomjs.js:72:10)
    at Ke (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/asciicast2gif/main.js:262:219)
    at Je (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/asciicast2gif/main.js:261:410)
    at Ie (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/asciicast2gif/main.js:261:320)
    at He (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/asciicast2gif/main.js:261:238)
    at Le (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/asciicast2gif/main.js:266:230)
    at xp (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/asciicast2gif/main.js:705:224)

[Xtigyro]

This seems to be a different problem - even though I've followed the default install steps on Ubuntu 20.04 - the aforementioned error occurs.

However, using the Docker container did the job well:

~/repos/xtigyro/deploy-kubernetes-kind # docker run --rm -v $PWD:/data asciinema/asciicast2gif https://asciinema.org/a/348726.cast demo.gif
==> Loading https://asciinema.org/a/348726.cast...
==> Spawning PhantomJS renderer...
==> Generating frame screenshots...
==> Combining 871 screenshots into GIF file...
==> Done.

[Zonalds]

@Xtigyro

This seems to be a different problem - even though I've followed the default install steps on Ubuntu 20.04 - the aforementioned error occurs.

However, using the Docker container did the job well:

~/repos/xtigyro/deploy-kubernetes-kind # docker run --rm -v $PWD:/data asciinema/asciicast2gif https://asciinema.org/a/348726.cast demo.gif
==> Loading https://asciinema.org/a/348726.cast...
==> Spawning PhantomJS renderer...
==> Generating frame screenshots...
==> Combining 871 screenshots into GIF file...
==> Done.

Were you able to find a solution?

[Xtigyro]

@Zonalds Yeah - just use the Docker image.

[ku1ik]

Try asciicast2gif's successor - https://github.com/asciinema/agg - it handles content type negotiation fine without the extension in URL.