Custom Banners in Spring Boot

1. Overview

By default, Spring Boot comes with a banner that shows up as soon as the application starts.

In this article, we’ll learn how to create a custom banner and use it in Spring Boot applications.

Bootstrap you application through SPRING INITIALIZR

Create your Spring-Boot project with the help of Spring Initializr.

Standard Maven Project Structure

Following is the complete project structure that we will be developing step-by-step.

2. Creating Custom Banner

Before we start, we need to create the custom banner which will be displayed at the time of application start-up time. We can create the custom banner from scratch or use various tools that will do this for us.

In addition to a text file, you can also add a banner.gif, banner.jpg, or  banner.png  image file to your classpath or set the  spring.banner.image.location  property. Images are converted into an ASCII art representation and printed above any text banner.

Test it by running the application and the default banner will be replaced with the following.

Configure Banner location in Application Property File

We can configure banner, both text and image in the application property file. In this way, we can choose to load the text and image file from any other location with some other name. Spring Boot provides the following property to configure location or name in the application.properties file.

spring.banner.location=classpath:/path/to/banner/bannername.txt
spring.banner.image.location=classpath:/path/to/banner/bannername.gif

Banner Variables

If you want to display some additional information with a banner on application start-up, you can do some by using banner variables. They can be used as placeholders inside your banner.txt.

The SpringApplication.setBanner(…​) method can be used if you want to generate a banner programmatically. Use the  org.springframework.boot.Banner  interface and implement your own printBanner() method.

The printed banner is registered as a singleton bean under the following name:  springBootBanner.

Turn – Off the banner using the Properties file

spring.main.banner-mode = off

Turn – Off the banner programmatically

public static void main(String[] args) {
    SpringApplication app = new SpringApplication(SpringBootCustomBannerApplication.class);
    app.setBannerMode(Banner.Mode.OFF);
    app.run(args);
}

3. Generating banner programmatically

Yes, you can also change the banner programmatically. For this spring boot provides org.springframework.boot.Banner interface. Override printBanner() method and provide your own implementation. Let us create “MyCustomBanner.java” inside “com.dailycodebuffer.example.SpringBootCustomBanner” package.

public class MyCustomBanner implements Banner {

    @Override
    public void printBanner(Environment environment, Class<?> sourceClass, PrintStream out) {
        out.println("================================================");
        out.println("      ##  I LOVE DAILY CODE BUFFER  ##        ");
        out.println("================================================");
    }
}

Now you have to register the above banner class “MyCustomBanner” with  SpringApplication. For this use the SpringApplication.setBanner(…​) method as below.

@SpringBootApplication
public class SpringBootCustomBannerApplication {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		SpringApplication application = new SpringApplication(SpringBootCustomBannerApplication.class);
		application.setBanner(new MyCustomBanner());
		application.run(args);
	}

}

Different other modes are available such as Banner.Mode.CONSOLE to print the banner on the console, Banner.Mode.LOG to print on a log, etc.

4. Conclusion

In this article, we saw different ways to use our own custom banners in place of default banners. I hope you have enjoyed this. If you loved our work, kindly subscribe our blog and in case of any problem let us know in the comment section below