How to get coloured terminal over ssh?

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.

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.

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

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)

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

~ > export | grep -i term
TERM=xterm

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'"