Can ctest display googletest console colors

Question

I am building and running unit tests built with googletest inside a cmake project with ctest enabled

I run the tests with "ctest -VV"

but the test output does not color the "red" and "green"

[ RUN ] [ OK ] [ PASSSED ]

Does anyone know if there is an options to ctest to allow those colors to bleed through to the console?

Answer 1

In cmake you can pass environment variables like that:

add_executable(testExecutable
        my_test.cpp)

target_link_libraries(testExecutable
        gtest)

add_test(NAME testExecutable
        COMMAND testExecutable)

add_custom_target(check
        COMMAND env CTEST_OUTPUT_ON_FAILURE=1 GTEST_COLOR=1 ${CMAKE_CTEST_COMMAND}
        DEPENDS testExecutable)

run $ make check

Answer 2

Maybe you don't want to export any variable to global scope and only have colors in one ctest call. In that case use this single command:

GTEST_COLOR=1 ctest -V

Answer 3

As the OP suggested, I added this line to my .bashrc and it worked:

export GTEST_COLOR=1