How to see color Ant output in MSYS/Git Bash?

Question

I'd like to use AnsiColorLogger to get color ouput from Ant. I'm using Git Bash on Windows.

I tried:

$ ant -logger org.apache.tools.ant.listener.AnsiColorLogger

but my output looks like:

Buildfile: c:\foo\build.xml
←[2;36m    [junit] Testsuite: org.foo.BarTest←[m
←[2;36m    [junit] Tests run: 1, Failures: 1, Errors: 0, Time elapsed: 0.188 sec←[m
←[2;36m    [junit] ←[m
←[2;36m    [junit] Testcase: testInherits took 0.175 sec←[m
←[2;36m    [junit]      FAILED←[m
←[2;36m    [junit] subdir not child←[m
←[2;36m    [junit] junit.framework.AssertionFailedError: subdir not child←[m
←[2;36m    [junit]      at org.foo.BarTest.testInherits(BarTest.java:61)←[m
←[2;36m    [junit] ←[m
←[2;31m    [junit] Test org.foo.BarTest FAILED←[m

I know ANSI colors work, at least partially, in Git Bash because commands like ls -ACF --color=auto produce nicely colored output.

What's the trick for Ant?

Gabar

Answer 1

After much Googling and experimentation, I combined several variations into a solution that works well for the particular combination of Git Bash, Ant and Windows.

Relaunch Git Bash after adding the following lines to your .bashrc file:

alias ant='cant'
function cant {
  "ant" -logger org.apache.tools.ant.listener.AnsiColorLogger "$@" \
      2>&1 | perl -pe 's/(?<=\e\[)2;//g'
}

Git Bash Noob Tip: .bashrc file, if it exists, lives in your home directory. Here's how to create/edit it:

$ cd
$ notepad .bashrc &

Gabar

For a general solution try creating a new file cant.bat beside your ant.bat within your ants bin folder with the following contents: @echo off call ant -logger org.apache.tools.ant.listener.AnsiColorLogger %* 2>&1 | perl -pe "s/(?<=\e[)2;//g" – Carrot

No need to relaunch bash, after modifying .bashrc; just source it, in the running shell, like this: . ~/.bashrc, (or source ~/.bashrc). – Tolidine

notepad really is an abysmal choice of editor for creating or modifying .bashrc, (or indeed any shell script intended for consumption by either bash.exe or sh.exe), because it doesn't comprehend the LF only line ending style, which is the norm for such scripts. – Tolidine

Answer 2

it's probably even easier to just set the environment variable ANT_ARGS. e.g. just put this in your .bashrc:

export ANT_ARGS='-logger org.apache.tools.ant.listener.AnsiColorLogger'

Isis