Grails 3 is based on Spring Boot. This means we get a lot of the functionality of Spring Boot into our Grails applications. A Spring Boot application has by default a banner that is shown when the application starts. The default Grails application overrides Spring Boot's behavior and disables the display of a banner. To add a banner again to our Grails application we have different options.

First we can add a file banner.txt to our classpath. If Grails finds the file it will display the contents when we start the application. Let's add a simple banner with Grails3 in Ascii art in the file src/main/resources/banner.txt. By placing the file in src/main/resources we can assure it is in the classpath as classpath:/banner.txt:

  ________             .__.__         ________
 /  _____/___________  |__|  |   _____\_____  \
/   \  __\_  __ \__  \ |  |  |  /  ___/ _(__  <
\    \_\  \  | \// __ \|  |  |__\___ \ /       \
 \______  /__|  (____  /__|____/____  >______  /
        \/           \/             \/       \/

Let's run our application with the bootRun task:

$ gradle bootRun
:compileJava UP-TO-DATE
:compileGroovy UP-TO-DATE
:processResources
:classes
:findMainClass
:bootRun

  ________             .__.__         ________
 /  _____/___________  |__|  |   _____\_____  \
/   \  __\_  __ \__  \ |  |  |  /  ___/ _(__  <
\    \_\  \  | \// __ \|  |  |__\___ \ /       \
 \______  /__|  (____  /__|____/____  >______  /
        \/           \/             \/       \/

Grails application running at http://localhost:8080
...

To have more information in the banner we can implement the org.springframework.boot.Banner interface. This interface has a printBanner method in which we can write the implementation for the banner. To use it we must create an instance of the GrailsApp class and set the banner property:

// File: grails-app/init/banner/Application.groovy
package banner

import grails.boot.GrailsApp
import grails.boot.config.GrailsAutoConfiguration
import grails.util.Environment
import org.springframework.boot.Banner

import static grails.util.Metadata.current as metaInfo

class Application extends GrailsAutoConfiguration {
    static void main(String[] args) {
        final GrailsApp app = new GrailsApp(Application)
        app.banner = new GrailsBanner()
        app.run(args)
    }
}

/**
 * Class that implements Spring Boot Banner
 * interface to show information on application startup.
 */
class GrailsBanner implements Banner {

    private static final String BANNER = '''
  ________             .__.__         ________
 /  _____/___________  |__|  |   _____\_____  \
/   \  __\_  __ \__  \ |  |  |  /  ___/ _(__  <
\    \_\  \  | \// __ \|  |  |__\___ \ /       \
 \______  /__|  (____  /__|____/____  >______  /
        \/           \/             \/       \/'''

    @Override
    void printBanner(
            org.springframework.core.env.Environment environment,
            Class sourceClass,
            PrintStream out) {

        out.println BANNER

        row 'App version', metaInfo.getApplicationVersion(), out
        row 'App name', metaInfo.getApplicationName(), out
        row 'Grails version', metaInfo.getGrailsVersion(), out
        row 'Groovy version', GroovySystem.version, out
        row 'JVM version', System.getProperty('java.version'), out
        row 'Reloading active', Environment.reloadingAgentEnabled, out
        row 'Environment', Environment.current.name, out

        out.println()
    }

    private void row(final String description, final value, final PrintStream out) {
        out.print ':: '
        out.print description.padRight(16)
        out.print ' :: '
        out.println value
    }

}

Now we run the bootRun task again:

$ gradle bootRun
:compileJava UP-TO-DATE
:compileGroovy
:processResources
:classes
:findMainClass
:bootRun

  ________             .__.__         ________
 /  _____/___________  |__|  |   _____\_____  \
/   \  __\_  __ \__  \ |  |  |  /  ___/ _(__  <
\    \_\  \  | \// __ \|  |  |__\___ \ /       \
 \______  /__|  (____  /__|____/____  >______  /
        \/           \/             \/       \/
:: App version      :: 0.1
:: App name         :: grails-banner-sample
:: Grails version   :: 3.0.1
:: Groovy version   :: 2.4.3
:: JVM version      :: 1.8._45
:: Reloading active :: true
:: Environment      :: development

Grails application running at http://localhost:8080
...

Written with Grails 3.0.1.

Original article

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