How do I get colour with Windows command prompt using RSpec in Ruby?

Question

In other o/s RSpec returns nicely coloured results (red, green etc).

However in the windows (Vista) command prompt my text output is just plain old boring white.

Answer 1

When using the MINGW64 bash shell provided by Git on Windows rspec displays things without any color. While this shell environment is perfectly capable of displaying ANSI color, rspec fails to detect it as a TTY. A super simple workaround is to use:

$ rspec --force-color

For example, take this boring old monochrome: :

And make it happy with one simple command line argument:

Answer 2

Did you specify '--color' in your rake rspec tasks' spec_opts? Something like this..

  Spec::Rake::SpecTask.new(:your_task_name) do |t|
    t.spec_opts = ["--color"]
    t.spec_files = [] # List of spec files
  end