how to prevent logging with color?

[nhooyr]

Don't want colored logs for the agent on GKE as the logs go to stackdriver and you see the raw escape codes everywhere.

[lox]

Did you check our docs? There is a no-color option.

[nhooyr]

I did, must have missed it.

Why not automatically enable color based on whether stderr is a tty or not?

[lox]

All good! Apologies for terse reply.

Why not automatically enable color based on whether stderr is a tty or not?

Good question, seems like a good idea! Things get a bit complicated with tty support cross-platform, but we could probably do that for linux/mac.

[keithpitt]

Why not automatically enable color based on whether stderr is a tty or not?

We do!

agent/logger/log.go

Lines 51 to 63 in 6f4f790

	func ColorsAvailable() bool {
	// Color support for windows is set in init
	if runtime.GOOS == "windows" && !windowsColors {
	return false
	}
	// Colors can only be shown if STDOUT is a terminal
	if terminal.IsTerminal(int(os.Stdout.Fd())) {
	return true
	}
	return false
	}

buildkite-agent start --config .buildkite-agent.cfg &> no-color.log

I looked at the output in no-color.log and it didn't have any colours. Where as if I run buildkite-agent start in a terminal, I get colours.

Sounds like maybe the thing on your end @nhooyr is reporting itself as a TTY. As far as the agent is concerned, I think it's doing the right thing!

[nhooyr]

Interesting. Thanks for looking into this for me.

[nhooyr]

Ah, kubernetes runs each app with a TTY so that when you run kubectl logs mypod in a terminal, you can see colors.

I guess that does make sense. Unfortunate with Stackdriver though, I think I'll file an issue with them to remove the escape codes.