In rails is it possible to get colour highlighting for the rake test command?

Question

When running the rake test command from the terminal within a rails 3 project directory, the test result output is not coloured. Hence it cannot be interpreted at a gla

Answer 1

I discovered that redgreen was abandoned years ago, and found this solution which works well and requires no script hacking. The output, however, shows which test is being run in real time. So it is a lot longer than built in test output. It does have nice colors.

http://rubygems.org/gems/turn

In my Gemfile:

group :test do
  gem 'turn'
end

Then run:

$ bundle install
$ rake test

The gem 'turn' works great. The caveat is that it doesn't seem to work with Mocha, due to monkey-patching issues. If you are using Mocha, you can use the redgreen gem. See instructions above in the approved answer for this question.

Answer 2

Yes, you can use the redgreen gem. Include it in your gemfile:

group :development, :test do
  gem 'redgreen'
end

And that's all you need for ruby 1.8. If you're using 1.9, there's a workaround. add the test-unit gem:

group :development, :test do
  gem 'redgreen'
  gem 'test-unit', '1.2.3
end

It's not perfect with 1.9 - test-unit seems to run an empty test suite after every rake task or generator call, which is harmless but annoying.

Answer 3

I am working on Rails 5.1.6 and I was also searching for a solution to make the reporting color. None of these solutions are working so I googled and saw this solution. Just add the following in test/test_helper.rb file:

require "minitest/reporters"
Minitest::Reporters.use!

By posting this, maybe it will help someone.