Having colours in remote consoles

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1

Hi all,

I was looking around in our deployment process and found out we deploy a file .iex.exs. Upon inspection this file only does Application.put_env(:elixir, :ansi_enabled, true). So I understand that this file is what enables colour when we use the remote_console. Now I don’t really like deploying this file just for that reason, so I started digging around how this works.

I found out that when starting a release, elixir decides to pass -elixir ansi_enabled true when stdin and stdout are both opened in a terminal. But because we start our release using systemd, the flag is not passed (at least I assume that’s the reason).

Although when running the remote_console I can see the flag is being passed to the that elixir process, but (I guess) because the release has ansi_enabled: false configured, there’s no colour.

So my question is in two-fold:

  1. Can the remote_console have colour based on it’s own ansi_enabled flag?
  2. Is it safe to just configure ansi_enabled: true in the release config?
2

You can configure your own colours like this:


IEx.configure(
  colors: [
    syntax_colors: [
      number: :light_yellow,
      atom: :light_cyan,
      string: :light_black,
      boolean: :red,
      nil: [:magenta, :bright],
    ],
    ls_directory: :cyan,
    ls_device: :yellow,
    doc_code: :green,
    doc_inline_code: :magenta,
    doc_headings: [:cyan, :underline],
    doc_title: [:cyan, :bright, :underline],
  ]
)

Just put that in .iex.exs

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