Rails colour highlighting for the Test::Unit/rake command?

Question

When running test/unit using 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

I discovered that redgreen was abandoned years ago, and found this solution which works well and requires no script hacking. The output, however, shows which test is being run in real time. So it is a lot longer than built in test output. It does have nice colors.

http://rubygems.org/gems/turn

In my Gemfile:

group :test do
  gem 'turn'
end

Then run:

$ bundle install
$ rake test

The gem 'turn' works great. The caveat is that it doesn't seem to work with Mocha, due to monkey-patching issues. If you are using Mocha, you can use the redgreen gem. See instructions above in the approved answer for this question.