Getting Proper UTF-8 Output From Fastlane on Jenkins 2.0 Pipeline builds

I've just been upgrading our Jenkins 1.x server to Jenkins 2.0. I've been migrating our previous jobs to new Multibranch Pipeline Jobs.

One of the snags I hit was that the previous nice ANSI sequences and UTF-8 symbols that we used to have were getting mangled and coming up as a series of escape characters and question marks.

There were actually two parts to fix this:

1. The ANSI Color plugin needs to be called in the Pipeline code, you can't just select a checkbox
2. The pipeline jobs start on the master and then get allocated a slave to run. So they take the locale of the master not the slave

So to fix:

Call the ANSI color plugin using a wrap statement. e.g.:

node('xcode7') {
   // Manually set the workspace to deal with clang 
   // choking on %2f in the directory
   ws(getWorkspace()) {
     // Wrap to enable ANSI escape sequences
     wrap([$class: 'AnsiColorBuildWrapper', 'colorMapName': 'XTerm', 'defaultFg': 1, 'defaultBg': 2]) {
       workspace = pwd()
       // Mark the code checkout 'stage'....
       stage 'Checkout'
       // Checkout code from repository
       checkout scm

       ...
     }
  }
}   

Secondly, you need to ensure the master runs as UTF-8. To do this I passed in an argument to the start script for Jenkins:

-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

So, in my case on FreeBSD, the statements I have in rc.conf are:

jenkins_enable="YES"
jenkins_args="--webroot=/usr/local/jenkins/war --httpPort=8180"
jenkins_java_opts="-Djava.net.preferIPv6Addresses=true -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8" 

Now it looks all pretty again and we get all the colouring and symbols from the output of Fastlane: