[13.5] Trace logging on `aspire doctor` causes weird indentation

[afscrome]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Describe the bug

If you run aspire doctor -l trace some of the log lines get logged weirdly. ⠚ Checking Aspire environment... can end up being logged at the start of a log line, messing up alignment of timestamps. In some cases, this can even happen in the middle of log lines.

Expected Behavior

When a verbose log level is used, you should probably supress any progress messages that are shown when logging is not enabled as the detailed logs themselves give you better progress messages.

Steps To Reproduce

aspire doctor -l trace

Exceptions (if any)

No response

Aspire doctor output

Aspire Environment Check
========================

Aspire
  ⚠️ Aspire CLI version 13.5.0-preview.1.26405.1 (channel: daily) is out of date. Latest version is 13.5.0-preview.1.26405.2 (channel: prerelease)  
       Run 'aspire update' to update Aspire CLI.       
  ✅ Developer Control Plane (DCP) connection health checks succeeded  

AppHost
  ✅ AppHost version 13.5.0-preview.1.26405.1 (app\Trayport.Aspire.AppHost\Trayport.Aspire.AppHost.csproj)  

.NET SDK
  ✅ .NET 10.0.302 installed (x64)  

Container Runtime
  ✅ Docker v29.6.2: running (auto-detected (default)) ← active  

Environment
  ✅ Operating system: Windows 10.0.26100.0  
  ✅ HTTPS development certificate is trusted  

Development Tools
  ✅ Aspire extension for VS Code is installed  

Summary: 7 passed, 1 warnings, 0 failed
For detailed prerequisites: https://aka.ms/aspire-prerequisites

Anything else?

No response

[MihuBot]

I'm a bot. Here is a possible related and/or duplicate issue (I may be wrong):

• aspire cli --debug output is mostly unusable #10487

[adamint]

James Newton-King (@JamesNK) this seems like the kind of thing you might like to take a look at

[joperezr]

🤖 Aspire triage pass — 2026-08-05 17:57 UTC

Area: area-cli
Kind: bug
Repro: yes-minimal — aspire doctor -l trace (see body)
Affected version(s): 13.5.0-preview.1 (daily)
Severity: S4 — cosmetic: spinner/progress lines (⠚ Checking Aspire environment...) interleave with trace log lines and break timestamp alignment

Urgency: ⚪ backlog — no milestone
Reason: output-formatting polish; below the regression / very-bad-bug bar for 13.5

Suggested owner(s): James Newton-King (@JamesNK) (score 12), backup Mitch Denny (@mitchdenny) (score 5)
Evidence:

• JamesNK merged Show status while preparing dashboard bundle #18985, Bound aspire doctor checks with timeouts #18969, Make CLI package metadata prefetching opt-in #18968 and many more in area-cli (last 30d)
• mitchdenny merged Remove duplicated profiles block from empty C# AppHost aspire.config.json #17781, fix(cli): restore implicit-channel discovery + guard non-interactive fuzzy auto-pick (#17724, #17725) #17728, Forward IdentityChannel to TemplateInputs.Channel for dotnet-runtime templates #17637 in area-cli
• CODEOWNERS lists Mitch Denny (@mitchdenny) James Newton-King (@JamesNK) David Fowler (@davidfowl) for src/Aspire.Cli

Confidence: high
Needs human?: no

[adamint]

I can reproduce this on macOS 26.6 arm64 in a real TTY. Trace logging was configured only with -l trace (no logging env var/config override).

Smallest repro I used was just an empty directory and:

TERM=xterm-256color LANG=en_US.UTF-8 DOTNET_CLI_UI_LANGUAGE=en <aspire> doctor -l trace

For the exact reported CLI, I installed Aspire.Cli 13.5.0-preview.1.26405.1+0182d1671498df3020eea7af5b006eb0bddbafc9 into <scratch> from the daily feed and ran that command. Exit code was 0, but the raw PTY output still contains the progress renderer mixed with trace/debug output, e.g.:

⠲ Checking Aspire environment...
                                [06:28:08] [dbug] BundleNuGetPackageCache: NuGetHelper stderr: Using source from config: nuget.org (https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json)

Expected: verbose/trace doctor output should not paint the progress spinner. Observed: spinner frames/cursor movement are emitted into the same terminal stream as the log lines, so timestamps can be shifted or visually interleaved.

I also checked latest stable 13.4.6+87fe259e4fc244c599019a7b1304c85a1488f248 and current main 13.5.0-dev from <repo>/artifacts/bin/Aspire.Cli/Debug/net10.0/aspire.dll; both show the same progress frames with aspire doctor -l trace. .NET SDK was 10.0.201. Docker was running, but an AppHost was not required for the repro.