Can ctest display googletest console colors

Question

I am building and running unit tests built with googletest inside a cmake project with ctest enabled

I run the tests with "ctest -VV"

but the test output does not color the "red" and "green"

[ RUN ] [ OK ] [ PASSSED ]

Does anyone know if there is an options to ctest to allow those colors to bleed through to the console?

Without knowing the way you added googletest to CMake nor your host environment, it's just a guess: Could this be duplicate to [GTest's output has no colors when built with cmake+ninja and executed automatically](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28888998/gtests-output-has-no-colors-when-built-with-cmakeninja-and-executed-automatica)? Can you give the googletest option `--gtest_color=yes` a try? — Florian, Dec 13 '15 at 21:00
So I tried --gtest_color=yes and that didn't work... but some more googling led me to GTEST_COLOR=1, setting this in my .travis.yml made the tests appear colored... but on my command line it looks like this 1: ←[0;32m[ RUN ] ←[mStringTest.Case, this suggest that googletest might be incorrectly thinking I'm an xterm, when actually I'm running bash inside a windows command prompt — MyDeveloperDay, Dec 18 '15 at 13:18

score 16 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 16 '16 at 13:08

16

As the OP suggested, I added this line to my .bashrc and it worked:

export GTEST_COLOR=1

answered Dec 16 '16 at 13:08

Étienne

4,773
2
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sadly, this doesn't work within the Windows Developer Command Prompt. `GTEST_COLOR` only seems to help when calling the Google Test runner manually; trying to use `ctest` still gives uncolored output :( – phetdam May 28 '22 at 04:51

score 12 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 07 '19 at 08:05

12

Maybe you don't want to export any variable to global scope and only have colors in one ctest call. In that case use this single command:

GTEST_COLOR=1 ctest -V

answered Feb 07 '19 at 08:05

MaEtUgR

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score 7 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 14 '19 at 17:47

In cmake you can pass environment variables like that:

add_executable(testExecutable
        my_test.cpp)

target_link_libraries(testExecutable
        gtest)

add_test(NAME testExecutable
        COMMAND testExecutable)

add_custom_target(check
        COMMAND env CTEST_OUTPUT_ON_FAILURE=1 GTEST_COLOR=1 ${CMAKE_CTEST_COMMAND}
        DEPENDS testExecutable)

run $ make check

Can ctest display googletest console colors

3 Answers3