Display Animated ASCII Birthday Wish in Linux Terminal 🎂

Birthdays are special occasions, and it’s very satisfying and a pleasure to get birthday wishes from loved ones.

As a Linux user, you can surprise our friends and family with some cool birthday wishes from the terminal.

Here's a birthday card (or should I say animation) I created for the birthday of Abhishek Sir.

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Everyone in the team liked it so much that I was requested to do a tutorial on it. I am only glad to comply as it may help our readers :)

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This tutorial requires editing config files in the terminal. Proficiency with Linux terminals and commands make it easier to follow this tutorial.

Install PyBirthdayWish

PyBirthdayWish is a small Python program through which you can create beautiful terminal birthday wishes. With music too!

The program itself is not available in the default repositories of Ubuntu. You need to install it using Pip.

PyBirthdayWish GitHub

First, install pip in Ubuntu, using the command below:

sudo apt install python3-pip

Once Pip is installed, you can clone the repo and install the program:

git clone https://github.com/hemantapkh/PyBirthdayWish.git && cd PyBirthdayWish && pip install -r requirements.txt

On their repo, you can check the .requirements.txt file to know what are the requirements as mentioned in the above command.

After the installation is complete, inside the PyBirthdayWish directory, that you have cloned, run the command below:

python3 PyBirthdayWish.py

This will ask you to press F11 and then enter to go full screen mode and then play the animation.

There is music too, but not shown here.

It's highly customizable. Let me show various levels of optional customization you can do with this tool.

Create the default birthday wish

In the above program, there are three wish Python files that can be used for the animation. They are, example (default), art and artwithstars. You can open these three files in text editor to get an overview.

Contents of the arts directory, which has the default and user created art files — Default art files

Now, if you want to use the artwithstars file instead of the default example, open the config.py in any available text editor, replace the arts entry with the required name and save it, as shown in the screenshot below:

Change the animation design file to "art with stars" on the config file — Change the design file

After that, in the PyBirthdayWish directory, run:

python3 PyBirthdayWish.py

And you will get the new animation.

Create a custom birthday wish

What if you want to print the name of your loved one, instead of the default text? This needs a little bit of patience because you need to edit the art file without destroying it.

First, make a backup copy of the design art files you want. Which is basically copying the file in the same arts directory but with a different name; say friend.py.

Now, open the design art file with the text editor of your choice. Replace the text in the art file with the one you need. It will be wise to use the symbols | _ \ / for creating the text, design etc. You can use an online tool to convert text to ASCII.

Copied one of the existing design files and added a new text "Friend" — New text "Friend" added as a new file

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Typing one character moves the rest of the animation one character forward. Similarly, removing a character moves the rest of the design, one character backward. So, you should add a space if you remove a character. Similarly, remove one space if you added a new character on a particular line. This should be done in real-time so that you can view the changes. This way, you can match the rest of the design and not destroy the looks, when completed.

After completing the edit, save it. Now, open config.py and change the art file to show your file.

Change the design file in the config to reflext the changes we have done — Change the config file to highlight the new file

You can now run to get your required text inside the animation:

python3 PyBirthdayWish.py

Use your own music file

You can use your own music file as part of this animation.

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If you are planning to upload the video on YouTube of other such sites, please use copyright-free music to avoid issues.

Copy your music file inside the cloned directory.

Custome music file is copied inside the cloned directory — Custom music file is copied inside the directory

Edit the config.py file to add the new music, as shown in the screenshot below:

Adding the custom music file to the config file to play it during animation — Custom music file added to config file

Done! Now, if you execute the run command, python3 PyBirthdayWish.py, the custom music will be played along with the animation.

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Create an executable

If you want to send the above wish message as an executable to a friend, there is a way for this too.

An associated pyinstaller will be installed to the .local/bin directory, which will not be on your path.

So add that directory to your path using:

export PATH=$PATH:/home/team/.local/bin

To make it permanent, add it to your ~/.bashrc file.

After you are done with the art file editing and changing the config file to reflect the change, use the command below to create an executable:

pyinstaller --noconfirm --onefile --console --icon "icon.ico" --no-embed-manifest --add-data "arts:arts/"  --add-data "config.py:." --add-data "HappyBirthday.mp3:." --add-data "PyBirthdayWish.py:."  "PyBirthdayWish.py"

It will create an executable file named “PyBirthdayWish” to the PyBirthdayWish/dist directory.