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//$(printf "\033[32mPASS\033[0m")/'' | sed ''/FAIL/s//$(printf "\033[31mFAIL\033[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)