Powershell - disable colored command output

Question

I'm running a command (New-AzResourceGroupDeployment -WhatIf) in Powershell (or Powershell Core, both are options here), that produces some very colorful output like this:

The problem is that when I run this in an Azure DevOps pipeline, the logging there gets confused by the colors and produces lots of gibberish:

So my question is: As this command itself does not have such an option, is there a general way in PowerShell (Core) to disable commands from producing colored output?

Answer 1

With PowerShell 7.2 there's probably a new solution for you:

$PSStyle.OutputRendering = [System.Management.Automation.OutputRendering]::PlainText;

From about_ANSI_Terminals document:

The following members control how or when ANSI formatting is used:

• $PSStyle.OutputRendering is a System.Management.Automation.OutputRendering enum with the values:
  • ANSI: ANSI is always passed through as-is
  • PlainText: ANSI escape sequences are always stripped so that it is only plain text
  • Host: This is the default behavior. The ANSI escape sequences are removed in redirected or piped output.

You can also try to query the PowerShell help system about it:

Get-Help -Name 'about_ANSI_Terminals';

A full example of use with something you have regardless of modules, etc. This:

$PSStyle.OutputRendering = [System.Management.Automation.OutputRendering]::Ansi;
$PSVersionTable | Format-List;

will produce a colored output, wile this:

$PSStyle.OutputRendering = [System.Management.Automation.OutputRendering]::PlainText;
$PSVersionTable | Format-List;

will produce plain-text. If you try this:

$PSStyle.OutputRendering = [System.Management.Automation.OutputRendering]::Host;
$PSVersionTable | Format-Table | Tee-Object -FilePath '.\output.txt';

you should get a colored output in your terminal/console, but plain-text in the output.txt file.

Also I've just found, that this was already answered here and described in much more detail.

Answer 2

It's exists a simple way if you are calling a bash azure task pwsh from linux, like this:

TERM=dumb pwsh yourscripthere.ps1