Tabula is a tool for recording and analysing command line sessions.
At a basic level, it's quite similar to the Unix 'script' tool, but rather than just recording everything that's typed or displayed, tabula tries to capture much more meaningful information about the actions that are being performed. It explicitly captures commands that are run and whether they were successful or not, the directory and environment they were run in, and the input and output consumed and produced.
Tabula reports either locally to a log file or centrally to a redis server. Using redis allows sessions to be accessed concurrently from multiple locations, and lets multiple people collaborate in a single session.
Output is produced in JSON format for easy analysis.
To start a basic recorded shell session, simply type tabula start. This will record to a session called default stores on your local machine at $HOME/.tabula/projects. Ctrl-d will terminate the recorded session and return you to your regular terminal.
You can connect to a different data store using the -d option, or specify the name of a different session by adding it as an argument. For example, to work on a project called 'homework' and write to a file in the current directory, you could do:
tabula start -d file://`pwd` homework
Currently, tabula recognises two protocols for storage: file://, which stores records on the local filesystem, and redis://, which connects to a redis server. For example, if you have a redis server running on localhost then you can connect to it using:
tabula start -d redis://localhost:6379
At present, tabula does not support authenticated connections to redis servers.
To review an existing session, you can use tabula cat to print out the session. cat admits both the -d option and the project name in the same was as start. It also allows you to print only the commands invoked as if recorded by bash history - to do this, use the --as-history option.
To view all sessions available at a destination, you may use tabula ls.
tabula - a utility for recording shell sessions.
Usage: tabula COMMAND [-V|--verbosity LEVEL] [-q|--quiet]
Open a recorded shell session for a specific project.
Available options:
--version Print version information
-h,--help Show this help text
-V,--verbosity LEVEL Set logging level (default ERROR)
-q,--quiet Disable logging
Available commands:
start Start or resume a project session.
cat Print a project session to stdout.
ls List all projects created at a destination.
Prerequisites:
The easiest way to build is in a cabal sandbox.
git clone git@github.com:nc6/tabula.git
cd tabula
cabal sandbox init
cabal update
cabal install --dependencies-only
cabal configure
cabal build
This will generate the tabula executable in dist/build/tabula/tabula.
Tabula comes (courtesy of optparse-applicative) with the option to generate automatic bash completions. The easiest way to get access to these is the following:
source <(tabula --bash-completion-script `which tabula`)