The test runner has no color exit on Jenkins

Question

I have jenkins settings on a Ubuntu 14.04 server on an EC2 instance. I have selenium tests that I run using behave as a test runner.

In Jenkins, I also installed the AnsiColor plugin, hoping that I can get color information on the jenkins console, however I get color for everything else except the Gherking Syntax. Selenium errors, python debug, everything has color ... except for behave output.

Now, if I run the tests on a Mac or Ubuntu, but not with a Jenkins user, everything works fine, and the colors are there.

I really don't have code to post, but I can say that I tried to no avail:

• works with behave --color
• map the AnsiColorPlugin color map to the escape sequences found in formatter/ansi_escapes.py
• adding #!/bin/bash to jenkins build script to make sure it won't run with sh instead of bash

If that makes any difference, I'm using python 3.4 on virtualenv

Besides the actual answer, any debugging suggestions are also welcome! thanks

Answer 1

While reading the source code for PrettyFormatter , there is no way to force it to use colors, as it uses isatty to determine if it is writing the actual terminal.

However, the necessary changes to enable color output are trivial:

https://github.com/mrkafk/behave/commit/5fa2dd3fd1dc7149857df4da156d8fd00f5058a5

I created a pull request and tested it to work in Jenkins (after enabling parsing ANSI codes in the project configuration, of course):