Karaf Branding Gotchas

If you've tried to get Karaf branding to work - you may have run into a couple of very obvious problems but oddly they are not addressed in the documentation - so here's a little on those experiences:

Escaping Special Characters:

ASCII art for the banner on the command line console is customized through a properties file (banner.properties). You need to be careful with escaping characters per the Java properties escaping rules especially of course the '\' character. The above is what I wanted for the banner.

Following is an excerpt from my properties file to achieve it:

Editing the Right File

/etc/banner.properties is what you alter/create to customize the banner shown when Karaf is started from the command line. 

However, if you want to apply the same look to your SSH client banner, you need to alter/create:

  /etc/banner-ssh.properties