Support Colorized Output in GitHub Actions

This may be a feature request more than an issue, but I’m out of my depth and having trouble finding where the breakdown occurs. Asking the experts! In response to a Twitter thread yesterday, I got some awesome feedback. One key piece of information is that GitHub Actions does support colorized console output (example). But I’ve never seen it in our dotnet test runs.

Here’s the monochromatic experience today:

We’re using xUnit which as far as I can tell only disables colorized output if -nocolor is passed to the console runner. That’s not the case, so I’m confused where in the pipe we’re dropping having better output. It will need a custom reporter (or at least detection) when GitHub Actions has a more full-fledged test results UI, but for now: colorized output would be a huge time saver and just generally make it a better experience.

Perhaps the fact that it’s wrapped in the GitHub Actions runner at all is the issue? There is #1762 related to being wrapped in another process - a result of IsOutputRedirected-style behavior breaking all? If it’s detection-based, it looks like the GITHUB_ACTIONS environmental variable is how it’s done elsewhere (example PR.

To get more info, I tried the /clp:ForceConsoleColor workaround for dotnet build (also currently monochrome in GitHub Actions). This did not work (example run here). We’d expect “Build Succeeded.” to be green as it is locally: …but it’s monochrome:

So…yeah I’m not sure what’s breaking down where and maybe it’s much more global that dotnet test. I just trying to even find where we can fix this. Is dotnet test eating the colorization? Or am I missing it and xUnit isn’t even trying to output it from a switch I’ve missed? Is is all dotnet * with Actions due to wrapping? Happy to close this issue and file it in the right place, and happy to assist in PR-ing towards a fix. Thanks for your time!

cc @bradwilson @clairernovotny @ethomson @livarcocc