In rails is it possible to get colour highlighting for the rake test command?

Question

When running the rake test command from the terminal within a rails 3 project directory, the test result output is not coloured. Hence it cannot be interpreted at a glance.

Is there a way of getting colourised output for the results, as you can get in rspec?

>rspec --colour

Answer 1

Yes, you can use the redgreen gem. Include it in your gemfile:

group :development, :test do
  gem 'redgreen'
end

And that's all you need for ruby 1.8. If you're using 1.9, there's a workaround. add the test-unit gem:

group :development, :test do
  gem 'redgreen'
  gem 'test-unit', '1.2.3
end

It's not perfect with 1.9 - test-unit seems to run an empty test suite after every rake task or generator call, which is harmless but annoying.