How do I always force `--console auto` in a gradle properties or environment variable?

Help/Discuss
1

For some reason, in gradle 2.7 my RoxTerm consoles are no longer using the rich output. The auto setting is not detecting that I can have a rich output.

I’d like to set this in a gradle.properties but I cannot figure out from the documentation how to actually do this.

How do I set a ~/.gradle/gradle.properties setting to always have --console=rich ?

2

AFAIK there’s not a way to force it via gradle.properties.

Did it stop working between Gradle versions (i.e., is it a bug on our side)?

What’s your environment? If you’re on a *nix, we look at the value for TERM and if it is set and not ‘dumb’, we then check if stdout/stderr are attached to terminals.

3

Actually it’s not even working in 2.1… Now I’m super confused… I remember it working in version 2.1, so maybe there’s an environment thing that happened… but I’m not sure what.

My environment:

4

Could you run with --debug to see if you see anything like this?

“Native-platform terminal integration is not available. Continuing with fallback.”

or

"Unable to load from native-platform backed ConsoleDetector. Continuing with fallback. Failure: {}

5

$ gradle --debug
22:29:00.107 [DEBUG] [org.gradle.internal.nativeintegration.services.NativeServices] Unable to load from native-platform backed Consol
eDetector. Continuing with fallback. Failure: net.rubygrapefruit.platform.NativeException: Failed to load native library ‘libnative-pl
atform-curses.so’ for Linux amd64.
caused by: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /home/dkowis/.gradle/native/19/linux-amd64/libnative-platform-curses.so: libncurses.so.5: c
annot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Sure enough. I assume archlinux doesn’t have a libncurses.so.5

Yep, it’s got this:

$ pacman -Ql | grep libncurses.so
chef-dk /opt/chefdk/embedded/lib/libncurses.so
chef-dk /opt/chefdk/embedded/lib/libncurses.so.5
chef-dk /opt/chefdk/embedded/lib/libncurses.so.5.9
ncurses /usr/lib/libncurses.so

Obviously the chef-dk ones aren’t useful for you :smile:
So a workaround for me could be to make a symlink in /usr/lib to libncurses.so… But that isn’t actually necessary, because it works fine when I specify --console=rich

Hope all this helps.

6

Is something missing from your LD_LIBRARY_PATH or you’ve done a system upgrade recently? That might explain why it used to work. There might be a ncurses-5 package you could install.

It works when you use --console=rich because we forcibly use colors, even if we think the console doesn’t support them.

7

Ah yeah, a system update probably happened. Archlinux is a rolling distro.

core/ncurses 6.0-3 [installed]
System V Release 4.0 curses emulation library

So there is only one ncurses. I can workaround it by making a symlink in /usr/lib from ncurses.so.5 to ncurses.so and that will probably get the job done for now. Or I can alias gradle="gradle --console=rich "

Thanks!

8

No problem. This is the lib we use: https://github.com/adammurdoch/native-platform

It looks like there’s a TODO about failing more gracefully when ncurses can’t be loaded, which would probably handle your case.

9

I’ve stumbled over the same issue on archlinux. The latest update broke the console color support, yet it works with --console=rich.

10

For reference, as a temporary measure, until the library has better detection, you can do:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libncursesw.so.6.0 /usr/lib/libncurses.so.5

And then gradle properly picks up that it’s rich without having to type it every time.

Or do the shell alias :slight_smile:

11

As an FYI, arch linux has an ncurses5-compat-libs in the AUR that gives backwards-compatibility support.