ANSI Color logging for improved output visibility.

Yes. It's possible - I've made a maven project that does it. The only catch is that under windows, while it works perfectly in cygwin xterms the native CMD.exe does not support it. I'll attach a zip in a minute.

To install, make the project and put the jar in $M2_HOME/lib.

Then, patch the plexus file in the maven uberjar:

In lib/, execute
jar xf maven-2.0.9-uber.jar org/codehaus/plexus/plexus-bootstrap.xml

In the unzipped file, edit the entry
org.codehaus.plexus.logging.console.ConsoleLoggerManager
to
ch.elca.el4j.maven.logging.FormattedLoggerManager

add it to the uberjar with (again in lib/)
jar uf maven-2.0.9-uber.jar org/codehaus/plexus/plexus-bootstrap.xml

and delete the org/ directory.

Ansi color is output only when you call maven with the option -Dplexus.logger.type=ansi.

It's no problem for us to release our maven utilities (colourlogger etc.) under the ASL or a similar license too. The LGPL is meant for the main framework - we'd be happy to contribute some of our utilities we use to help building el4j with maven to the maven community and adapt the license accordingly.

The maven-colorlogger project references a chain of el4j parent poms which aren't in the zip. If anyone else wants to try it, I found the immediate parent here: https://el4j.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/el4j/trunk/el4j/maven/pom.xml
In the end, I just removed the parent reference, told the maven-compiler-plugin to compile for 1.5, and it all worked.

An even easier way to try it is to download the el4j binaries from https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=147215&package_id=162180&release_id=638658 and use the modified Maven 2.0.9 therein.

BTW, if anyone was using an awk hack like this one while waiting for colour logging in Maven - http://blog.bazoud.com/post/2008/10/20/Maven-in-colour-/-Maven-en-couleur - watch out for interactive goals which mess up awk's line buffering...

pom.xml for maven-colorlogger, modified to remove parent reference.

A slightly different approach, yet considerably easier.
http://johannes.jakeapp.com/blog/?p=28
Works of course on environments that support it, but assuming all unices want it, you can just fix your "Maven2 Start Up Batch" script to add this.

Like so: (at the end of the mvn bash script distributed)

exec "$JAVACMD" \
$MAVEN_OPTS \
-classpath "$

/bin/m2.conf" \
"-Dmaven.home=$

" \
$

$QUOTED_ARGS |
sed -e 's/Tests run: ([^,]), Failures: ([^,]), Errors: ([^,]), Skipped: ([^,])/[1;32mTests run: \1[0m, Failures: [1;31m\2[0m, Errors: [1;33m\3[0m, Skipped: [1;34m\4[0m/g' \
-e 's/([WARN].*)/[1;33m\1[0m/g' \
-e 's/([INFO].*)/[1;34m\1[0m/g' \
-e 's/([ERROR].*)/[1;31m\1[0m/g'

Or is that just the one gentoo provides? Anyhow, you could provide this to your distributers.

A comment on Johannes Buchner's sed approach: I discovered this fails with archetype:generate because the prompts are hidden by sed's line buffering

I have implemented it on the scmchanglog-maven-plugin on Codehaus (not on the release version) as a PoC without any dependency (alas not on Windows I am afraid). This is just a wrapper on the current Maven Logger, so it should be easy to add to the current Maven distribution.
http://svn.codehaus.org/mojo/trunk/mojo/scmchangelog-maven-plugin/src/main/java/org/codehaus/mojo/scmchangelog/scm/util/ColorConsoleLogger.java

Emmanuel

A patch for Plexus used to build Maven 2.2.0 (unix only)

I have built a Maven 2.2.0 version with colorized traces.
You can download it there: http://www.ehsavoie.com/2009/07/maven-en-couleurs.html
You have to run the command with -Dcolorized.console=true

For example:
mvn -Dcolorized.console=true clean install

If you don't want to wait till this issue gets fixed, I wrote a little tool called "Console Colorizer" to have complete control over colorizing the Maven 2 output that works with any version of Maven.

Note that if Maven used JAnsi, color logging would work everywhere including Windows.