Found the answer! According to this gradle forum post, there’s no public interface for coloring the output of the logger. You are free to use the internal classes, but those may change in future versions. In the gradle script, put at the top:
Older Gradle:
import org.gradle.logging.StyledTextOutput;
import org.gradle.logging.StyledTextOutputFactory;
import static org.gradle.logging.StyledTextOutput.Style;
Gradle 3.3+:
import org.gradle.internal.logging.text.StyledTextOutput;
import org.gradle.internal.logging.text.StyledTextOutputFactory;
import static org.gradle.internal.logging.text.StyledTextOutput.Style;
(I still haven’t figured out how to move this to the init.gradle file.) Then shortly after, define
def out = services.get(StyledTextOutputFactory).create("blah")
I’m still not sure what needs to be in the create method’s string (it doesn’t seem to affect anything yet). Then later in your task,
out.withStyle(Style.Info).println('colored text')
This should work with all the categories: normal, header, userinput, identifier, description, progressstatus, failure, info, and error. An additional step if you want to customize the color of each category, add the following to an init.gradle file in your ~/.gradle directory (or other options):
System.setProperty('org.gradle.color.error', 'RED')
and then replace the “error” category with any from the above list.