screenci

Tutorial videos of your app, from one prompt.

Describe the video in one sentence, paste one prompt into the coding agent you already use, and get back a narrated, auto-zoomed walkthrough of your real app, recorded on your own machine. Edit narration, voices, and languages in the browser. Engineers keep the videos in the repository, where each one is a Playwright E2E test: CI re-records them on every push, and a flow that broke fails the run. This package is the CLI and the authoring API behind all of it.

What is open source and what is hosted

• Open source (MIT, this repository): the CLI and the authoring API. Recording runs locally with them: Playwright drives your app in Chromium and the CLI captures the screen and the interaction timing.
• Hosted service: rendering (narration, camera, cursor, subtitles, overlays), the web editor, and public URLs. Previews are free with no account; exports need a paid plan.

What leaves your machine

The raw recording, its timing data, and the text files of the screenci/ folder (the config and the video scripts; set uploadSources: false to keep them local). Never .env files, lockfiles, your app's source, or your signed-in browser session. redact(locator) masks secrets in the page before the frame is captured. Full list: What ScreenCI sends.

Learn more at screenci.com, or start from Make videos by prompt (no repository needed) and Repository and CI (the engineering hand-off).

Get started

npm init screenci@latest
# or (pnpm 11, the --config flags are a temporary workaround)
pnpm --config.minimum-release-age-exclude=screenci --config.enable-global-virtual-store=false dlx screenci@latest init

This scaffolds a self-contained screenci/ directory with its own dependencies and installs Chromium. The directory is isolated from the surrounding workspace, which keeps installation reliable inside monorepos.

Then write a video, run it locally, refine it, and export the final output:

npx screenci test      # author the video
npx screenci preview   # record live previews and print the link
npx screenci export    # render and download the finished video

Full docs:

• Overview
• Start in a repository
• Writing scripts
• CLI reference

Write a video

Video scripts are Playwright-style files with a .screenci.ts extension. If you already know Playwright locators, navigation, and waiting, you already know most of the automation layer.

// recordings/onboarding.screenci.ts
import { hide, speed, time, video } from 'screenci'

video('Onboarding flow', async ({ page }) => {
  await hide(async () => {
    await page.goto('https://app.example.com/signup')
  })

  await page.getByLabel('Email').fill('[email protected]')
  await page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Create account' }).click()
  await speed(0.5, async () => {
    await page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Open dashboard tour' }).click()
  })
  await time(1000, async () => {
    await page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Skip tutorial' }).click()
  })
  await page.getByRole('heading', { name: 'Dashboard' }).waitFor()
})

Each video() call becomes one output video. The title becomes the filename and the remote video identity. Inside video(), page is a ScreenCIPage: a Playwright Page with animated cursor movement and visible typing layered on top of normal Playwright behavior.

hide() removes setup entirely. speed() and time() keep a section visible but remap its rendered duration.

Authoring helpers

Export	What it does
defineConfig	Wraps Playwright config with ScreenCI defaults
video	Declares a video recording test
video.narration	Declares narration cues (per language or shared) for a video
hide	Cuts setup or cleanup out of the visible recording
autoZoom	Smooth camera follow for an interaction block
zoomTo	Manual camera framing for a locator or point
resetZoom	Returns from manual framing to the full viewport
video.overlays	Draws timed overlays (rings, callouts, media) over the video
voices	Available voice constants such as voices.Ava
modelTypes	Narration model constants

See the docs for configuration, narration, camera, and CI setup.

Community

Questions, ideas, or want to show off your videos? Join us on Discord.