Colors in the capistrano.log file

[mbouchard]

I was using capistrano 3.4 with airbrussh 0.3.0 and the capistrano.log file was formatted with colors that command like cat can print. Since I upgraded to capistrano 3.8, there's no color anymore in the log file. Is there a way to bring that feature back?

[mattbrictson]

Good question!

I am pretty sure this is due to a change in Capistrano itself. Capistrano now only uses color when it detects a color-capable console. Since a file is not a console, it automatically disables the color.

You can override this behavior by setting this environment variable:

SSHKIT_COLOR=1

There might be a way for Airbrussh to force the log file to always be color, without requiring the user to intervene by setting the environment variable. But I'm not sure if that is a behavior I want to hardcode. What do you think?

@robd any strong opinion on this one?

[robd]

Hey

Nothing to add really other than to say I think this change happened in SSHKit Version 1.8: capistrano/sshkit#246 (discussion here: capistrano/sshkit#245)

We made the assumption that most people would not want ansii color escape sequences in the log files since it makes them hard to read in a normal text editor. We kept support for the SSHKIT_COLOR env var so that people could override this, such as in your case.

You can also set this in Ruby using ENV['SSHKIT_COLOR'] = '1'. I guess the best place to do this would be the Capfile - correct me if I'm wrong @mattbrictson.

[mbouchard]

ENV['SSHKIT_COLOR'] = '1' did the trick. Thank you for your great gems!