Escape chars in output of `gitlab-runner list`

Version: gitlab-runner version 1.1.4 (9e2fd1a)

I was very confused why my sed regexps did not work as intended. Unless I saw output from Ansible verbose mode, it's quite interesting:

[root@XXXX config]# gitlab-runner list --config /home_local/gitlab-runner/.gitlab-runner/config.toml
Listing configured runners                          ConfigFile=/home_local/gitlab-runner/.gitlab-runner/config.toml
XXX                                       Executor=shell Token=XXXX URL=XXX
[root@XXXX config]# gitlab-runner list --config /home_local/gitlab-runner/.gitlab-runner/config.toml 2>&1 | less
Listing configured runners                        ESC[0;m  ConfigFileESC[0;m=/home_local/gitlab-runner/.gitlab-runner/config.toml
XXX                                     ESC[0;m  ExecutorESC[0;m=shell TokenESC[0;m=XXX URLESC[0;m=XXX

There are escape characters inserted, ESC[0;m is (afaik, maybe I'm wrong here) clear construction which disables styling modifications after this. I can overcome this but why there are escape characters there ? It complicates the manipulations on text and colors and only used in Debug mode, within header.

No, colors are used even without debug - errors and warnings are colored. And the escapes are here because our logrus formatter is setting the coloring reset code at the end of each entry in logrus fields (for .WithFields() log lines).

@tmaczukin ok, so is it hard to add --nocolor option ? Automation of gitlab-runner would be a lot easier then.

I was thinking about that yesterday. We can consider this, it should be relatively easy to make it working.

Milestone changed to v1.3

Added feature proposal label

mentioned in issue #1266

mentioned in merge request !179

Reassigned to @tmaczukin

I just tripped on this issue with escape characters in the output, spent 20 minutes trying to understand why my regular expression doesn't work.

Options --force-color and --no-color will help, but the default behavior is wrong. Escape characters should not go to a pipe or file. It is probably a bug in logrus library. May be it is even fixed already, there is a relevant issue https://github.com/Sirupsen/logrus/issues/351, though it is not clear was it fixed or not.

I think this issue should be investigated a little bit more. Maybe I will find a spare couple of hours to do so.

I agree with @gtrafimenkov. Color codes don't belong into the syslog either.

Milestone changed to %Backlog