How to force symfony colors on windows with PuttyCyg?

Van de Voorde Toni — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:18:14 +0000

Those of you who’re developing with symfony under windows will have noticed that, when running tasks in the command prompt, no colors are used. This is because the windows command prompt isn’t compatible with the color notation.
Most of you also have cygwin installed (shame on you if you didn’t :p). But even if you run the tasks through “PuttyCyg”, which is fully compatible with the color notation, you will not benefit from the colors.

Why?

The problem resides in the symfony class “sfAnsiColorFormatter” in the method “supportsColors($stream)”:

  /**
   * Returns true if the stream supports colorization.
   *
   * Colorization is disabled if not supported by the stream:
   *
   *  -  windows
   *  -  non tty consoles
   *
   * @param mixed $stream A stream
   *
   * @return Boolean true if the stream supports colorization, false otherwise
   */
  public function supportsColors($stream)
  {
    return DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR != '\\' && function_exists('posix_isatty') && @posix_isatty($stream);
  }

The method supportsColors($stream) decides whether or not colors are supported. And as you can see, one of the checks is the directory separator which in our case will always return false because we are on a windows operating system. So even if you run tasks through puttycyg the directory separator will remain the same.

Possibility 1

If you always work through the puttycyg you could simply set the method to always return true, but in a command prompt it will look like this:

Dos Command Output

Possibility 2

Detect if cygwin is used. This way when you use the dos command the output will work and when cygwin is used you’ll have the colors .

I checked the $_SERVER array to find something that could help me to distinguish the cygwin prompt with the dos prompt, and I found that the ‘PWD’ key is only available on *nix shells. And when I print the value of $_SERVER['PWD'] in the cygwin prompt it gives me “/cygdrive/f/sandbox/adlogix/branch-3.2/frontend”.

Knowing that, here is how we can change the supportsColors method:

  /**
   * Returns true if the stream supports colorization.
   *
   * Colorization is disabled if not supported by the stream:
   *
   *  -  windows
   *  -  non tty consoles
   *
   * @param mixed $stream A stream
   *
   * @return Boolean true if the stream supports colorization, false otherwise
   */
  public function supportsColors($stream)
  {
    $supported = DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR != '\\' && function_exists('posix_isatty') && @posix_isatty($stream);

    return $supported ? true : !is_bool(strpos(@$_SERVER['PWD'], "/cygdrive"));
  }

What I did, is still using the check symfony used, but when it returns false I do a second check to see if the $_SERVER['PWD'] exists and that it contains the String “/cygdrive”.

Now when I run the taks through cygwin I get the colors and when I run it in dos it displays correctly.

PuttyCyg versus Dos

I only tested it on my machine, so if you have troubles or a better way to do it, please let me know .

Update: This is only tested with symfony 1.2 and as from sf 1.3 there will be an option –color to force the colors.

Update: For some reason it does not work in the cygwin bash shell. When I set the message manually (echo -e “\033[31mHello World\033[0m”) in the command the colors appear, but through symfony not. I suspect that the cygwin bash shell miss interprets the returns of php, but I have no idea why it does work on puttyCyg (which only launches the cygwin shell) … probably some startup configuration of the bash ?!

Basic tips and tricks: 4.Css

van Rumste Kenneth — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 11:42:12 +0000

Hello everybody, I’m back with another version of basic tips and tricks.

After having a talk with a client, about the basic on css, I thought it might be good to have an easy introduction.

So let’s give it a try. We’ll talk about:

Why would you use css?
How to insert css in your html file
How css is written
Css on objects, classes and unique objects
Basic css properties and there values
The pseudo class
Where to find good information on css

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation (that is, the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language.

CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation, including elements such as the colors, fonts, and layout.

Why would you use css?

Whenever you create an html page without css, you will probably insert layout into it. But every object will have to get it’s layout specifications and that could be a hard time, especially if you have a lot of objects that need the same layout.
You don’t know any examples of objects with the same layout?

A menu with 4 or 5 buttons.
Buttons
A list
Different headings and titles
Paragraphs
…

As you can see, I don’t need to think very hard to get different objects on which the same layout can be applied.

I guess you see my point why you could use the same css code over and over again, instead of rewriting it for each object in your page.
And I’m not even talking about different pages or a whole website…

How to insert css in your html file

CSS is a file containing code you and that puts a layout on specific objects in your html file.

That code can be written in a html file within these tags

Or in a css file that is included within the tags.

Whatever css code you write in there will be applied to the code within that page.

If you are creating a website or more than one page, it might be more sufficient to use an include so you can reuse the same code over and over again.

In my opinion the only times you can or should use the

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How to force symfony colors on windows with PuttyCyg?

Basic tips and tricks: 4.Css