colors-le

Find every colour in a codebase and, given a palette, say which ones are not in it. Answered over a whole repository with an exit code a CI step can fail on.

npx colors-le src/
npx colors-le --palette brand.txt src/
npx colors-le --values --dedupe src/ | sort -u   # the start of a palette

This is the same command line as the Rust crate colors-le, and it behaves identically: same flags, same walk, same output, same exit codes. Install whichever toolchain you already have.

What it reads

Every file. CSS, SCSS, LESS, Stylus, HTML, XML, SVG, JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, YAML, TOML, Markdown and plain text are read by name, and anything else is scanned as raw text and reported as format unknown. Directories are walked the way ripgrep walks them: .gitignore, .ignore and hidden files are respected unless you pass --no-ignore or --hidden. A binary file is passed over and counted in the summary.

Output

stdout carries one JSON report per file whenever it is piped or redirected, and nothing when it is a terminal. stderr carries the human summary.

{"file":"src/theme.css","format":"css","colors":[{"value":"#1a2b3c","notation":"hex","line":4,"column":12,"inPalette":true}],"diagnostics":[],"summary":{"colors":1,"outsidePalette":0}}

inPalette appears only when a palette was given.

The palette

--palette <file> takes one colour per line, a JSON array, or a flat JSON object's values. Comparison is by colour, so #FFF, #ffffff and rgb(255, 255, 255) are one entry. A named colour is only equal to itself: white in the palette does not approve #ffffff.

Exit codes

• 0: colours found, and none outside the palette.
• 1: no colours found, or at least one outside the palette.
• 2: the question was malformed, or --strict and a text file could not be read.

For agents

colors-le mcp serves the Model Context Protocol on stdio with two tools: extract_colors for a document's text and colors_le_scan for files and directories. Hosts that want the server alone can install colors-le-mcp.

colors-le --help lists every option.

MIT licensed. Part of letools.