clusterctl describe not working in Windows PowerShell

[killianmuldoon]

Running cluster describe cluster my-cluster on PowerShell results in broken output as the colors are not rendered correctly. There is a current workaround involving setting a NO_COLOR environmental variable to print the output without color.

clusterctl describe (on main) supports a --color flag which forces color output when it's off by default (the library clusterctl uses fatih/color does this when the output is not to a terminal. Currently this flag defaults to false and is a no-op when set to false.

One solution to the PowerShell problem would be to change the usage of that flag so that when it's set to false it always turns the color off. That would allow users to explicitly opt out of using colors in the output.

/area clusterctl
/kind bug

[fabriziopandini]

/triage accepted

Q: should we report the issue to fatih/color maintainers? (or might be this already has been fixed in latest version of this library)

[sbueringer]

I'm not sure if the library is wrong, but rather our usage of it.

[fabriziopandini]

that could be another issue as well, but I think we should nail down the problem before deciding to workaround it

[killianmuldoon]

We're using the latest version (v1.13.0) but it's 1+ years old. This issue might have been solved in a more recent commit. I think changing the behaviour of the color flag is good as a change in any case, but it would be very nice if we could get color output working on PowerShell.

[sbueringer]

I think it's definitely bad that we still produce colored output if someone sets --color=false (if I understood it correctly)

I'm not sure if the library is wrong, but rather our usage of it.

Sorry, that was easily misunderstood. I was only referring to the way colored output can be enabled/disabled with our flag + how the lib reacts to NO_COLOR.

But of course let's also take a look at how the colored output is not rendered correctly in PowerShell and if a new library version fixes that or we should open an issue in their repo.

[killianmuldoon]

I'll report the issue, bit after going over a bunch of workarounds it seems that there's a general issue with getting colors to work in PowerShell / cmd environments.

Changing the terminal settings as described here - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51680709/colored-text-output-in-powershell-console-using-ansi-vt100-codes - worked to fix the output but did not actually get colors in the output 😕.

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/lifecycle stale

[killianmuldoon]

/close

I believe this was fixed in https://github.com/fatih/color/releases/tag/v1.15.0.

Closing due to lack of interest.

[k8s-ci-robot]

@killianmuldoon: Closing this issue.

In response to this:

/close

I believe this was fixed in https://github.com/fatih/color/releases/tag/v1.15.0.

Closing due to lack of interest.

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