node.js: Console Colors 101

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!