Enabling color output with ccache+clang

Quick tip here...

Typically when you compile with clang you get some pretty sexy color coded error messages (as seen above). This is great and all, but if you are running through ccache (which is awesome btw), then you will notice that you lose the hot color coding, which will probably make you sad. The problem isn't ccache stripping out the color coding exactly, its that clang is detecting that its not printing to a terminal that supports color (because its going through the ccache process which knows nothing about color).

The fix is quite easy though, just pass "-fcolor-diagnostics" on the command-line to clang like so...

$(CCACHE) $(CLANG) -fcolor-diagnostics

...but what if you want to run your build through some sort of automated build system that then forwards the log to people via email or pipe it through some other system that doesn't understand color? Well I got a solution for that as well, just have your makefile check for color!

COLOR_DIAGNOSTICS = $(shell if [ `tput colors` -ge 8 ]; then echo -fcolor-diagnostics; fi)
$(CCACHE) $(CLANG) $(COLOR_DIAGNOSTICS)

In this case I check for a terminal that supports at least 8 colors.