Fix spinners on non-ansi terminals (windows, CI)

[glennsarti]

The spinners in Windows terminals are particularly annoying and mess up output e.g.

C:\Source\puppet-strings [use-litmus +2 ~2 -0 !]> bundle exec rake "litmus:provision[docker, centos:7]"
C:/Source/puppet-strings/.bundle/windows/ruby/2.5.0/gems/puppet-6.5.0-x64-mingw32/lib/puppet/util/windows/api_types.rb:6: warning: already initialized constant FFI::WIN32_FALSE
C:/Source/puppet-strings/.bundle/windows/ruby/2.5.0/gems/pdk-1.10.0/lib/pdk/util/windows/api_types.rb:6: warning: previous definition of WIN32_FALSE was here
C:/Source/puppet-strings/.bundle/windows/ruby/2.5.0/gems/puppet-6.5.0-x64-mingw32/lib/puppet/util/windows/api_types.rb:9: warning: already initialized constant FFI::ERROR_SUCCESS
C:/Source/puppet-strings/.bundle/windows/ruby/2.5.0/gems/pdk-1.10.0/lib/pdk/util/windows/api_types.rb:9: warning: previous definition of ERROR_SUCCESS was here
 Provisioning centos:7 using docker provisioner.[|]Cloning into 'spec/fixtures/modules/facts'...
Cloning into 'spec/fixtures/modules/provision'...
Cloning into 'spec/fixtures/modules/puppet_agent'...
 Provisioning centos:7 using docker provisioner.[\]remote: Enumerating objects: 34, done.
remote: Counting objects:  88% (30/34)                                                                                        remote: Counting objects:   8% (6/69)                                                                                         remote: Counting objects: 100% (69/69), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (54/54), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (28/28), done.
Receiving objects:  88% (30/34)    15 (delta 2), pack-reused 0 eceiving objects:  85% (29/34)
Receiving objects: 100% (34/34), 21.28 KiB | 4.25 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (7/7), done.
remote: Enumerating objects: 182, done.Rremote: Total 69 (delta 7), reused 48 (delta 4), pack-reused 0                        Receiving objects: 100% (69/69), 28.49 KiB | 140.00 KiB/s, done.


Resolving deltas: 100% (7/7), done.82)    esolving deltas:   0% (0/7)
remote: Counting objects: 100% (182/182), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (159/159), done.
Receiving objects:  90% (164/182)    103 (delta 12), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (182/182), 127.03 KiB | 631.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (22/22), done.provisioner.[-]esolving deltas:   0% (0/22)
 Provisioning centos:7 using docker provisioner.[/]

Is there an easy way to disable them? If so, why is it not documented?

[tphoney]

Hi @glennsarti does this affect all commands that have spinners, or just provisioning ?
@florindragos what are your thoughts on this ?

[glennsarti]

@tphoney I would hazard a guess anything. Windows consoles and spinners have never played nicely.

But that aside, it should be a UX feature to disable these kinds of things to make logging and like more sane. e.g. I can't pipe stdout to a file with spinners :(

[florindragos]

Is there a (cross platform?) way maybe we could check if the session is interactive and only display the spinner in that case?

[ekohl]

It looks like STDOUT.tty? is the easiest way:

$ cat test.rb 
puts STDOUT.tty?
$ ruby test.rb 
true
$ ruby test.rb  | sort
false

I don't have access to a Windows machine to check.

[DavidS]

STDOUT.tty? is mostly good, except for CI systems that emulate a TTY to capture colored output (like travis and github actions), but don't provide the actual terminal support to deal with the spinners. The PDK has some code to deal with that already.