How to get coloured terminal over ssh?

Question

When I connect over ssh to remote hosts everything is just a single font/color. I would like to have colours like I do locally e.g. green for executable and blue for symlinks etc. And such that when I run $ git diff on the ssh host it shows me diff with colours =)

Answer 1

This worked for me:

ssh -t my_host my_command

-t was the key. Explained:

-t      Force pseudo-tty allocation.  This can be used to execute arbitrary screen-based programs on a
        remote machine, which can be very useful, e.g. when implementing menu services.  Multiple -t
        options force tty allocation, even if ssh has no local tty.

Answer 2

Because it was xterm on the server, I figured something was wrong with .bashrc

And indeed! ls --color=auto works only when you are connected to TTY. Changing everything to simply --color in .bashrc on the remote host and everything is in pretty colours now.

Answer 3

Seems like colors were already set in ~/.bashrc for me and the issue is that ssh does not use the bashrc file. You can use bashrc in your ssh session by adding the following to ~/.bash_profile:

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
      . ~/.bashrc
fi

Answer 4

Since the colors worked fine while being loggged in directly, I just un-uncommented the line force_color_prompt=yes in the file ~/.bashrc, that gave me colors over ssh, too:

# uncomment for a colored prompt, if the terminal has the capability; turned
# off by default to not distract the user: the focus in a terminal window
# should be on the output of commands, not on the prompt
force_color_prompt=yes

(Ubuntu 18.04 LTS)

Answer 5

What's the content of your XTERM env variable on the server when you connect to it?

~ > export | grep -i term
TERM=xterm

Answer 6

In my case, the missing part was to have colored ls, grep, etc. which can be added by adding aliases to the .bashrc file:

alias ls='ls --color=auto'
alias grep='grep --color=auto'

etc.

Answer 7

In my situation, I recently installed chef-local and it asked me to add a line to .bash_profile. When I sign in, .bashrc never loads anymore, because it saw .bash_profile.

What I did was to add a line in .bash_profile:

source .bashrc
export PATH="/opt/chefdk/embedded/bin:$PATH"

I logged out and back in and got my colored terminal right away.

Answer 8

There is a comment from "Mike E" above that contained the answer for me, but it is not only hard to read, it is kind of hard to figure out what he means if you don't use .bashrc a lot - and I don't.

After screwing around a bit, I got the desired results by changing the following lines in ~/.bashrc on the machine I was logging into with ssh:

# set a fancy prompt (non-color, unless we know we "want" color)
case "$TERM" in
    xterm-color|*-256color) color_prompt=yes;;
esac

to:

# set a fancy prompt (non-color, unless we know we "want" color)
case "$TERM" in
    xterm-color|*-256color) color_prompt=yes;;
    xterm) color_prompt=yes;;
esac

I am thinking I could have just added "|xterm" after "color" in the first line, or dug around and figure out why ssh was using "xterm" instead of "xterm-color" and change that, but this works and I have other things to do now.

Answer 9

I tried changing ~./bashrc settings (both on local and remote server), but it did not seem to work.

Then I noticed that ~/.bashrc of remote server does not even get executed if I connect to it over ssh. So I made ~/.bashrc of remote server to execute by puttinng if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then . ~/.bashrc fi in remote server's ~/.bash_profile. (based on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/820517/bashrc-at-ssh-login).

So this solution did not require changing any ~/bashrc files directly but it did require changing ~/bash_profile file of remote server so that ~/bashrc file of remote server got executed.

Answer 10

I was losing my color when connecting via a proxy because TERM=dumb so I fixed it:

ssh myproxy "ssh pi@localhost -p 5000 -tt 'TERM=xterm bash'"

Answer 11

This worked for me: just open your .bashrc file in your $HOME folder, and uncomment the line force_color_prompt=yes

Answer 12

cd
cat << 'EOF' >color_terminals_over_ssh.sh
#!/bin/bash
#Must pass either enable or disable to script
#./color_terminals_over_ssh.sh enable

DO=$1

if [[ $DO = "enable" ]]
then
 sudo sed -i '/force_color_prompt=yes/s/^#//g' /home/*/.bashrc
 sudo sed -i '/force_color_prompt=yes/s/^#//g' /root/.bashrc
 sudo su
elif [[ $DO = "disable" ]]
then
 sudo sed -i '/force_color_prompt=no/s/^/#/g' /home/*/.bashrc
 sudo sed -i '/force_color_prompt=no/s/^/#/g' /root/.bashrc
 sudo su
fi

cat ~/.bashrc | grep force_color_prompt=yes

EOF
chmod +x color_terminals_over_ssh.sh
./color_terminals_over_ssh.sh enable

Answer 13

I had this issue after creating a new user on Linux (Ubuntu). Setting force_color_prompt=yes didn't do it for me.

I forgot to specify the shell, so it went for the default /bin/sh, redirecting to /bin/dash apparently on my distribution. When manually setting it to /bin/bash everything worked out of the box.

So in my case I could have used the -s flag when adding the user (so useradd -s /bin/bash ... to specify the shell. Instead I used chsh -s /bin/bash to set it after creation.

Answer 14

just run

sudo chsh -s /bin/bash <user>

Answer 15

On native Debian systems like the Raspberry Pi there is a .profile file in the users home directory that takes care of this. Ubuntu doesn't appear to have a default .profile in the users home directory. I copied the .profile from a Raspberry Pi and put it in my home directory on the Ubuntu system and now when i login remotely via SSH I have color directory listings. Here are the contents of the ~/.profile file:

# ~/.profile: executed by the command interpreter for login shells.
# This file is not read by bash(1), if ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login
# exists.
# see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files for examples.
# the files are located in the bash-doc package.
the default umask is set in /etc/profile; for setting the umask
for ssh logins, install and configure the libpam-umask package.
#umask 022
if running bash
if [ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ]; then
    # include .bashrc if it exists
    if [ -f "$HOME/.bashrc" ]; then
    . "$HOME/.bashrc"
    fi
fi
set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi
set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/.local/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
fi

Answer 16

Terminal-based applications typically color output based on the value of the environment variable TERM and sometimes others like COLORTERM. These will need to be set on the host.

You can test this by running the command with colored output after setting the environment variables with export. You can determine the value to change term to by running echo $TERM on your local machine, or you can use xterm or xterm-256color.

After ssh'ing into the host:

export TERM=xterm
echo abcd | grep ab

Locally, the terminal sets the TERM environment variable. Ideally, you want to pass this along to the remote server so that the programs will use the right ANSI codes or escape sequences to colorize the output in a way that is compatible with the terminal you are currently using.

One way to accomplish this is to create the an entry in ~/.ssh/config for your target host and instruct ssh to pass the current value of TERM. If the file doesn't exist, you can create it.

Host example
    Hostname example.com
    SendEnv TERM

If you're using a terminal that isn't recognized by an older system you are ssh'ing into (such as Ghostty which sets xterm-ghostty) you may want to pick a value that the server recognizes and that all of your terminals more or less support. This can be done with SetEnv.

Host example
    Hostname example.com
    SetEnv TERM=xterm

Most coloring is done with a 16 or 256 color pallete. Newer terminals support 16 million colors. I have software that detects the terminals ability to support this number of colors by reading the COLORTERM environment variable and looking for the value truecolor. This variable is again set locally by the terminal, but needs to be passed to the server. Our Host entry can be modified accordingly.

Host example
    Hostname example.com
    SetEnv TERM=xterm
    SendEnv COLORTERM

If you try this and run echo $COLORTERM you may find that it has not been set on the remote machine. This is because sshd on the server is not configured to accept COLORTERM from ssh clients.

If you have permissions on the host to change the sshd settings, edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and add COLORTERM to AcceptEnv. Then sshd must be restarted with systemctl restart sshd (or the appropriate command for your system) for the configuration to take effect.