colorizing golang test run output

I like it when terminal/console test runs actually show their output in either red or green text. It seems like a lot of the testing libraries available for Go have this. However, I'd like to just use the default testing package that comes with Go. Is there a way to colorize it's output with red and green?

You can use grc, a generic colourizer, to colourize anything.

On Debian/Ubuntu, install with apt-get install grc. On a Mac with , brew install grc.

Create a config directory in your home directory:

mkdir ~/.grc

Then create your personal grc config in ~/.grc/grc.conf:

# Go
\bgo.* test\b
conf.gotest

Then create a Go test colourization config in ~/.grc/conf.gotest, such as:

regexp==== RUN .*
colour=blue
-
regexp=--- PASS: .*
colour=green
-
regexp=^PASS$
colour=green
-
regexp=^(ok|\?) .*
colour=magenta
-
regexp=--- FAIL: .*
colour=red
-
regexp=[^\s]+\.go(:\d+)?
colour=cyan

Now you can run Go tests with:

grc go test -v ./..

Sample output:

To avoid typing grc all the time, add an alias to your shell (if using Bash, either ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile or both, depending on your OS):

alias go=grc go

Now you get colourization simply by running:

go test -v ./..

You can create a wrapper shell script for this and color it using color escape sequence. Here's a simple example on Linux (I'm not sure how this would look on windows, but I guess there is a way.. )

go test -v . | sed ''/PASS/s//$(printf "3[32mPASS3[0m")/'' | sed ''/FAIL/s//$(printf "3[31mFAIL3[0m")/''

There's also a tool called richgo that does exactly this, in a user-friendly way.

You would still need a library to add color escape code like:

• for Windows: mattn/go-colorable or shiena/ansicolor
• for Unix or Windows: fatih/color or kortschak/ct
• for Unix or Windows: logrusorgru/aurora (mentioned by Ivan Black in the comments)

From there, you specify what you want to color (StdOut or StdErr, like in this example)

rakyll/gotest (screenshot) is a binary that does this.

Example:

$ gotest -v github.com/rakyll/hey

BoltDB has some test methods that look like this:

func assert(tb testing.TB, condition bool, msg string, v ...interface{}) {
    if !condition {
        _, file, line, _ := runtime.Caller(1)
        fmt.Printf("3[31m%s:%d: "+msg+"3[39m\n\n", append([]interface{}{filepath.Base(file), line}, v...)...)
        tb.FailNow()
    }
}

Here are the rest. I added the green dots here.

Emoji

You can use colors for text as others mentioned in their answers to have colorful text with a color code or using a third-party library.

But you can use emojis instead! for example, you can use⚠️ for warning messages and 🛑 for error messages.

Or simply use these notebooks as a color:

📕: error message
📙: warning message
📗: ok status message
📘: action message
📓: canceled status message
📔: Or anything you like and want to recognize immediately by color

🎁 Bonus:

This method also helps you to quickly scan and find logs directly in the source code.

_{But some distributions of Linux default emoji font are not colorful by default and you may want to make them colorful, first.}

As suggested from Alexander Staubo's answer, one can use grc for getting colorized output.

On linux the config file is stored in /etc/grc.conf<br>
Instead we can use the flag -c: grc -c .grc/conf.gotest go test ….<br>
So we only need the conf.gotest file.

I like piping to an awk script for this. That way, you can customize with whatever colors/patterns suit you. You have a particular test output unique to your project you want to highlight with a certain color? Go for it.

Simply save this awk script to ./bin/colorize in your project, chmod 755 ./bin/colorize, and customize to your needs:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f

# colorize - add color to go test output
# usage:
#   go test ./... | ./bin/colorize
#

BEGIN {
    RED="\033[31m"
    GREEN="\033[32m"
	CYAN="\033[36m"
	BRRED="\033[91m"
    BRGREEN="\033[92m"
	BRCYAN="\033[96m"
    NORMAL="\033[0m"
}
         { color=NORMAL }
/^ok /   { color=BRGREEN }
/^FAIL/  { color=BRRED }
/^SKIP/  { color=BRCYAN }
/PASS:/  { color=GREEN }
/FAIL:/  { color=RED }
/SKIP:/  { color=CYAN }
         { print color $0 NORMAL }

# vi: ft=awk

And then call your tests and pipe to colorize with:

go test ./... | ./bin/colorize

I find this method much easier to read and customize than the sed answers, and much more lightweight and simple than some external tool like grc.