color

For many new Ansible-based projects, I build my tests in Molecule, so I can easily run them locally or in CI. I also started using GitHub Actions for many of my new Ansible projects, just because it's so easy to get started and integrate with GitHub repositories.

I'm actually going to talk about this strategy in my next Ansible 101 live stream, covering Testing Ansible playbooks with Molecule and GitHub Actions CI, but I also wanted to highlight one thing that helps me when reviewing or observing playbook and molecule output, and that's color.

By default, in an interactive terminal session, Ansible colorizes its output so failures get 'red' color, good things / ok gets 'green', and changes get 'yellow-ish'. Also, warnings get a magenta color, which flags them well so you can go and fix them as soon as possible (that's one core principle I advocate to make your playbooks maintainable and scalable).

From time to time, I write up little PHP scripts to run a command via exec() and dump the output to the screen. Most of the time these are quick throwaway scripts, but sometimes I need them to persist a little longer, or share the output with others, so I make them look a little nicer.

One annoying thing that happens if you interact with CLI tools that generate colorized output is that PHP doesn't translate the terminal (ANSI) color codes into HTML colors, so you end up looking at output like:

Sensio Labs maintains an excellent ansi-to-html PHP library, and if you're building anything that should be persistent or robust, you should use it. But I wanted a one-line solution for one simple script I was working on, so I spent a couple minutes building out the following regex: