How to get color output from SSH command

Question

I'm trying to run some commands remotely and recieve the output back with color. What am I missing?

Here's what I've got so far:

example.sh

. /etc/profile
[[ -f ~/.profile ]] && . ~/.profile;
[[ -f ~/.bashrc ]] && . ~/.bashrc;
echo "hello remote"
cd /vagrant/repositories/repo
pwd
phpunit --color

I'm piping the script into ssh as follows:

cat example.sh | ssh vagrant@localhost /bin/bash -s

Solution

Yes, it is possible using -tt switches, which will force TTY allocation and it will trick the remote program to write also the colors. Minimal test I can run on my system:

Without colors:

ssh localhost "cowsay hello | lolcat"

With colors:

ssh -tt localhost "cowsay hello | lolcat"

Comments

[Jakuje]

the linux tools usually recognize that on the other side of pipe is not a terminal. I don't think there is some universal way to force all of them to do so.

[Andy Fleming]

@Jakuje — Is the same true for ssh -T?

[Jakuje]

-T removes the TTY allocation. Probably you can trick it with ssh -tt, but I haven't try it yet.

[Andy Fleming]

This does output color, but the ssh session does not automatically exit like in the normal "single command" mode.

[Jakuje]

it does for me. What server/client version of openssh are you using?

[Andy Fleming]

OpenSSH_6.6.1p1 Ubuntu-2ubuntu2, OpenSSL 1.0.1f 6 Jan 2014

[Jakuje]

I have 6.7p1. It should work the same if you don't have any special shell on remote side. Adding exit at the end of command can do some change, but not sure ...