Spectre.Console

Capabilities Reference

Complete reference for terminal capabilities, environment variables, and CI detection in Spectre.Console

This reference documents the terminal capabilities that Spectre.Console detects, the environment variables that influence detection, and the CI systems that are automatically recognized.

Demonstration of capabilities being detected by env variables

Detected Capabilities

These capabilities are stored in AnsiConsole.Profile.Capabilities:

Capability What It Means
ColorSystem How many colors: none, 8, 16, 256, or 16 million (TrueColor)
Ansi Can the terminal understand escape codes for styling?
Links Can text be clickable hyperlinks?
Interactive Is someone there to answer prompts?
Unicode Can it display Unicode characters like ─ and │?
Legacy Is this an old-style Windows console?

Environment Variables

These environment variables influence capability detection:

Variable What It Does
NO_COLOR Set to any value to disable all colors. Follows the NO_COLOR standard.
COLORTERM Set to truecolor or 24bit to enable 24-bit color on Unix systems.
TERM Your terminal type (like xterm-256color). Usually set automatically.
ConEmuANSI Set to On if using ConEmu on Windows and colors aren't working.

Example usage:

NO_COLOR=1 ./myapp

CI Environment Detection

Spectre.Console automatically detects these CI/CD systems and adjusts capabilities accordingly:

CI System Environment Variable Capability Changes
GitHub Actions GITHUB_ACTIONS=true Ansi=true, Interactive=false, Links=false
Azure Pipelines TF_BUILD (non-empty) Interactive=false
GitLab CI CI_SERVER=yes Interactive=false
Jenkins JENKINS_URL Interactive=false
Travis CI TRAVIS Interactive=false
TeamCity TEAMCITY_VERSION Interactive=false
AppVeyor APPVEYOR Interactive=false
Bitbucket Pipelines BITBUCKET_COMMIT Interactive=false
CircleCI CIRCLECI Interactive=false
Bamboo bamboo_buildNumber Interactive=false
Bitrise BITRISE_BUILD_URL Interactive=false
GoCD GO_SERVER_URL Interactive=false
MyGet BuildRunner=MyGet Interactive=false
Continua CI ContinuaCI.Version Interactive=false

GitHub Actions receives special treatment: Spectre.Console enables ANSI colors since the runners support them, even when standard detection might not recognize it.

See Also