feat(ci): support colorized output in GitHub Actions

[tdabasinskas]

Hi,

First, thanks for a great tool!

Would it be possible to add support for colorized output in GitHub Actions? As I understand, you are using fatih/color module for colorized output. As per the documentation, the module does support colorizing output in GitHub Actions, but requires explicitly setting color.NoColor = false.

Could we introduce some flag or environment variable, e.g. FORCE_COLOR, which, when set would set color.NoColor to false?

[jlandowner]

Hi @tdabasinskas. Thanks for raising!

I didn't know that 👀
I understand that setting the env NO_COLOR=1 disables colored output, but is it enabled by default in GitHub Actions?

I came up with a idea to set color.NoColor = false by default when the env NO_COLOR is not present...but is it meaningless?
Do you mean it is necessary to handle color control regardless of env NO_COLOR?

[tdabasinskas]

Hi,

Thanks for a quick reply!

The way I understand fatih/color works is:

• If there's NO_COLOR environment variable set (regardless of its value), it explicitly disables colors.
• If there's no NO_COLOR nor color.NoColor set, it automatically decides if the colors should be used based on terminal type (which, in case of GitHub Actions results in no colors).
• If color.NoColor is explicitly set to false, it always uses colors.

So, my suggestion would be the following:

• Do not change any existing behavior of NO_COLOR environment variable.
• Introduce new environment variable FORCE_COLOR which, if set, explicitly adds color.NoColor=false.

This would result in no breaking changes as well as follow common patterns - some languages (e.g. Python) and frameworks already support FORCE_COLOR environment variable which forces the console coloring.

[jlandowner]

Thanks for the information! I learned much through this issue😳

I thought this feature should be discussed in the library and found fatih/color#155

By default, faith/color does not colorize outputs if stdout is not a TTY.

Unfortunately it is no merged at this point but I also found fatih's stance for env FORCE_COLOR . So it might be a native support in the library in the future.
fatih/color#156 (comment)

But chartsnap is inspired by the existing UI snapshot testing tools like Jest.

As listed in https://force-color.org/,
Jest supports env FORCE_COLOR and also --color cli option to colorize outputs even if stdout is not TTY. https://jestjs.io/docs/cli#--colors

So I understand it is worth implementing this feature👍

[jlandowner]

Released v0.4.3 🚀

You can also check this job.
https://github.com/jlandowner/helm-chartsnap/actions/runs/12517536227/job/34918495488#step:6:63

[tdabasinskas]

Already tested it - works great. Thanks!