How to Create a Custom Spring Boot Banner with ASCII Art and Color

Customizing Spring Boot startup banner

Place a file named banner.txt in src/main/resources. Spring Boot reads this file at startup and prints its content instead of the default banner.

Supported placeholders

${AnsiColor.BRIGHT_RED}

– sets the following text color to bright red. ${application.version} – reads the Implementation-Version value from the MANIFEST.MF file. ${application.formatted-version} – a formatted version derived from ${application.version}. ${spring-boot.version} – displays the Spring Boot version. ${spring-boot.formatted-version} – displays a formatted Spring Boot version.

Generating ASCII art for the banner

Hand‑crafting ASCII art is tedious, so use an online generator to convert text or images into a character matrix and copy the result into banner.txt. Common free tools include:

http://patorjk.com/software/taag

http://www.network-science.de/ascii/

http://www.degraeve.com/img2txt.php

Example banner

An example banner may contain festive text such as “Happy New Year, never downtime, no bugs” together with the placeholders above. When the application starts, Spring Boot renders the custom banner with the specified colors and version information.