node.js: Console Colors 101

#console #colors #node #javascript

We've all seen a module or a node.js application that has changed the color of the command prompt font. Heck, even npm changes the color of it's text!

I will show you how to do it.

There are two ways of doing this:

Using a module
Not using a module

The easy way (with module)

You can go ahead and grab chalk:

npm install chalk

Using chalk is easy! For example, if you want to console.log with blue, then do this:

const chalk = require('chalk');

console.log(chalk.blue('Hello world!'));

Easy, isn't it?

For more documentation, visit the guide.

The not-so-easy way (without a module)

Wanna crank down that dependency list? Noone wants to see code that has too many requires! Go ahead, follow me.

This is a bit messy, but this is basically what the other modules do:

Yes, that long string does the coloring. Here is an explanation:

The "\x1b[36m" part makes your text cyan, the "%s" part gets replaced with your text, and the "\x1b[0m" part resets the colors the way they should be.

But don't worry, you don't have to memorize the color codes. Instead, here is a reference!

Reset = "\x1b[0m"
Bright = "\x1b[1m"
Dim = "\x1b[2m"
Underscore = "\x1b[4m"
Blink = "\x1b[5m"
Reverse = "\x1b[7m"
Hidden = "\x1b[8m"

FgBlack = "\x1b[30m"
FgRed = "\x1b[31m"
FgGreen = "\x1b[32m"
FgYellow = "\x1b[33m"
FgBlue = "\x1b[34m"
FgMagenta = "\x1b[35m"
FgCyan = "\x1b[36m"
FgWhite = "\x1b[37m"

BgBlack = "\x1b[40m"
BgRed = "\x1b[41m"
BgGreen = "\x1b[42m"
BgYellow = "\x1b[43m"
BgBlue = "\x1b[44m"
BgMagenta = "\x1b[45m"
BgCyan = "\x1b[46m"
BgWhite = "\x1b[47m"

Hope this tutorial helped someone out there. Thanks for reading!

Top comments (6)

Mike Ralphson • Apr 6 '17

I've found it's useful to honour (or should that be honor?) the NODE_DISABLE_COLORS environment variable so users can easily disable this feature if it's not wanted. Documentation here.

I simply define colours as:

var red = process.env.NODE_DISABLE_COLORS ? '' : '\x1b[31m';
var green = process.env.NODE_DISABLE_COLORS ? '' : '\x1b[32m';
var normal = process.env.NODE_DISABLE_COLORS ? '' : '\x1b[0m';