David's virtual world

What to do when symfony cli colorization does not work on unix systems

I recently ran into an interesting problem: symfony wouldn’t colorize the command-line output on any recently installed openSUSE (11.2) system. At first I was totally at a loss, but after diving into the code base and doing some debugging I finally found the core of the problem: the posix PHP extension was not installed.

So if any of you experience a similar issue, check if the extension is present and loaded. On openSUSE systems it’s enough to install the php5-posix package. Looks like the package maintainers start to leave out stuff that hardly anyone uses anymore, which is basically a good thing. It just caught me on the wrong foot

I filed a ticket to include this in the symfony installation documentation because i couldn’t find it mentioned anywhere.