Azure / Azure/deployment-stacks
What-if 'Potential' color (light cyan) is hard to read in GitHub Actions output
- Dominant language
- Bicep
- Stars
- 101
- Forks
- 13
- PR merge metrics
- No merged PRs in 30d
Description
**Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.**
The color used for `Potential` changes in what-if output (light cyan) isn't readable in the GitHub Actions log display. GitHub Actions renders logs on a dark background, and light cyan on that background is low enough contrast that the `Potential` lines are hard to pick out — which is a problem, because those are exactly the lines a reviewer needs to look at before approving a stack update in a pipeline.
This matters more for stacks than for regular deployments, because the whole value of running what-if in CI is that a human reads the output at an approval gate. If the most ambiguous change class is the hardest one to read, the gate is less useful.
**Describe the solution you'd like**
Pick a color for `Potential` that meets a reasonable contrast ratio against both light and dark terminal backgrounds, and verify it specifically in the GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps log viewers rather than only in a local terminal.
Failing that, either of these would help:
- Respect `NO_COLOR` / provide an explicit switch to disable ANSI coloring, so pipelines can fall back to the symbol/label prefix alone.
- Make the change-type label itself unambiguous in plain text, so color is decoration rather than the primary signal.
**Describe alternatives you've considered**
Stripping ANSI codes in the pipeline step. That makes the output readable but loses the color coding entirely for every change type, not just `Potential`.
**Additional context**
Raised by a customer during early adoption of stacks what-if after GA, running it in GitHub Actions. Related to #244, which covers the layout and resource ID display of the same output; this issue is specifically about color contrast/readability.
Contributor guide
No contributing guide indexed for this repository
Research direction
No file or test is named. Start with the what-if output path that assigns the Potential color and reproduce it in GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps log viewers. Done means Potential is readable against both backgrounds, with the stated NO_COLOR or unambiguous plain-text fallback considered if contrast alone is insufficient.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- azure, github-actions
- Domain
- cli, devops
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Activity status
- Active
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 52/100