Apache Karaf Branding Example

Abstract

You can change the look‘n feel (branding) of the Karaf shell console to provide your own Karaf distribution. It’s also possible to brand the Karaf SSH shell.

To do so, you have two solutions:

• Provide a branding.properties file in the Karaf etc folder.
• Provide a bundle providing the branding

Using etc/branding.properties file

It's probably the easiest way to customize the Karaf shell console.

The branding.properties basically contains the “welcome message” or “message of the day” (displayed when Karaf starts).

NB: It's also possible to configure the shell prompt in the prompt property in etc/shell.init.script.

For instance, the following branding.properties:

welcome = \
\n\
\u001B[1m  My Lovely Apache Karaf Branding\u001B[0m (x.x.x)\n\
\n\
Hit '\u001B[1m<tab>\u001B[0m' for a list of available commands\n\
   and '\u001B[1m[cmd] --help\u001B[0m' for help on a specific command.\n

Note here the using of the ASCII code (\u001B[1m) allowing you to use bold, italic, color, ... text in the shell console.

The only drawback of this approach is the branding.properties is “visible” and can be changed by an end-user.

The second solution using a bundle allows you to “hide” the branding.properties file.

## Using branding bundle

This example also provides a branding bundle wrapping the branding.properties file.

A branding bundle has to wrap a org.apache.karaf.branding package containing the branding.properties file.

Artifacts

The karaf-branding-example bundle is the one providing our custom branding properties file.

### Build

To build the karaf-branding-example bundle, you just have to do:

mvn clean install

Deployment

The karaf-branding-example bundle has to be part of the startup bundles. You have two ways to register your custom branding bundle:

1. You can define the karaf-branding-example bundle URL (mvn:org.apache.karaf.examples/karaf-branding-example/LATEST) in the etc/startup.properties file.
2. You can create your own custom profile (see profile example for detail), defining karaf-branding-example bundle URL (bundle.mvn\:org.apache.karaf.examples/karaf-branding-example/LATEST = mvn:org.apache.karaf.examples/karaf-branding-starter/LATEST) in the etc/profile.cfg file.