Curl just downloads the http response and prints it to the terminal. The sever streams the response and yields a frame of the video every 70ms or so. It sends control characters in the response to clear the terminal and change the color.

I figure that the response uses ascii escape sequences to control the terminal (and that curl is just piping the response to the terminal).

Short Story: this is just a website.

If you go to parrot.live from your browser it automatically redirects to the GitHub page for the project; The code for which is on line 103: https://github.com/hugomd/parrot.live/blob/master/index.js#L...

You'll notice though that if you change the user agent from your browser to include the string 'curl' you can reach the site from within the browser as the redirect logic encapsulating line 103 doesn't fire.

You can do that by:

* Opening Chrome,

* Opening Chrome Dev Tools within Chrome,

* Going to the Network Tab within Chrome Dev Tools,

* Clicking on "More Network Conditions" within the Network Tab,

* Go the the "User Agent" section and type 'curl' whithout the parens,

* Navigate to parrot.live with the network tab open and you should see the ascii animation in your browser.