bannerMaker

Create tidy text based banners for CLI based systems, servers and appliances.

Author: Brett Verney

Version: v1.1 | 22-09-2023

As a Network Engineer I feel I have wasted far too many hours trying to centre text while creating Message of the Day and Authentication Failure banners for CLI based network infrastructure i.e. Cisco and Aruba.

This tool takes away that pain.

Really though, it takes one or more paragraphs of text and centres it between a box depicted by asterisks. Nothing more, nothing less.

It also preserves blank lines which other tools don't without great difficulty.

Requirements

• Python 3+
• Python Libraries
  • parawrap

Basic Script Usage

python bannerMaker.py <input_file>


Where <input_file> is a text file containing one or more paragraphs of text.

The resulting banner will be output to banner.txt

Example

A file named input.txt contains the following text:

Executing the script and specifying the input.txt file as an argument:

python bannerMaker.py input.txt

Creates a file named banner.txt containing the following:

Another example:

The whitespace is preserved by utilising 'space' characters instead of tabs so that the output can copied and pasted directly to the CLI or config file as is.

Customisation

The script uses box width and text padding values that are considered safe for most terminal CLI appliances by default. These can be modified within the script itself. It is best to use even integers:

box_width = int(76)
padding = int(4)

You can also modify the heading at the top of the banner:

heading = ('WARNING')