🐚 FreeBSD MOTD Customizer and dynamic_MOTD Installer

This project customizes your Message Of The Day at login to have a fun custom banner, some stats about your system, and the weather. It automates installation, configures fonts, displays live weather, and ensures you get a rich and dynamic login experience out of the box.

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✨ Features

• Automated installer for dynamic_motd
• Custom banner text displayed in a rotating set of fun figlet fonts (customizable!)
• Colorful output with lolcat
• System stats at a glance:
  • 🖥️ Hostname
  • ⏱️ Uptime
  • 🧠 Memory usage
  • 💽 Root filesystem disk usage
• 🌦️ Live weather via wttr.in
• 🔀 Font rotation – different figlet font at each login
• 👎 Failsafe behavior – if a tool is missing, output gracefully falls back

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⚡ Quick Start

You can install this tool in two easy ways:

Option 1️⃣: Fetch and Run Installer Script Directly

fetch -o - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kevinlearnscoding/FreeBSD-MOTD-customizer/refs/heads/main/FreeBSD-MOTD-Customizer.sh | sh

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Option 2️⃣: Download, Inspect, and Run

fetch -o installer.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kevinlearnscoding/FreeBSD-MOTD-customizer/refs/heads/main/FreeBSD-MOTD-Customizer.sh
chmod +x installer.sh
./installer.sh

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⚠️ Requirements & Notes

• Requires FreeBSD 13.0+
• Installer will automatically install:
  • dynamic_motd
  • figlet + figlet-fonts (www.figlet.org)
  • curl
  • lolcat
• Unicode support:
  • Use a UTF-8 locale (e.g., en_US.UTF-8)
  • Use a font with extended glyph support (recommended: Nerd Fonts)

⚠️ Note on Icons and Emojis
Not all terminals render fancy characters equally. If icons like 🧠 or 🌦️ don’t appear correctly, try switching fonts or terminals.

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🛠️ What the Installer Does

1. Prompts you for setup details:

   • Banner text
   • City or airport code (for weather)
   • Temperature units (°F or °C)

2. Installs dependencies and configures system services:

   • Disables update_motd
   • Enables dynamic_motd
   • Backs up /etc/motd.template

3. Deploys a new MOTD generator script at /usr/local/etc/rc.motd which:

   • Displays your custom banner in a rotating font
   • Adds system stats with decorative dividers
   • Fetches and shows weather info

4. Starts the service immediately, so you see results on your next shell login.

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🖼️ Example Output (without color because github filters it out!👎)

 __  __          _____                          
|  \/  |        / ____|                         
| \  / |_   _  | (___   ___ _ ____   _____ _ __ 
| |\/| | | | |  \___ \ / _ \ '__\ \ / / _ \ '__|
| |  | | |_| |  ____) |  __/ |   \ V /  __/ |   
|_|  |_|\__, | |_____/ \___|_|    \_/ \___|_|   
         __/ |                                  
        |___/                                   
                                                              
Font used: big
------------------------------------------------------------
 🖥️  Hostname : freebsd-testbox
 ⏱️  Uptime   : 3 days
 🧠 Memory    : 2048 MiB used / 8192 MiB total
 💽 Disk      : 12G used / 32G

------------------------------------------------------------
 🌦️  Weather:
 San Francisco: 🌤️ +22°C
------------------------------------------------------------

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📂 Configuration

After installation, you can edit the MOTD script directly:

/usr/local/etc/rc.motd

• Add or remove fonts from the rotation
• Change the banner text
• Adjust the weather query URL
• Insert your own custom system checks or ASCII art

Changes take effect immediately on the next login.

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🙌 Contributing

• Contributions to this installer are welcome!
• If you want to improve dynamic_motd itself, head over to the upstream repo: sstallion/dynamic_motd.

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📜 License

This project is an installer and customizer only and is distributed under the BSD 2-Clause License, in line with the upstream dynamic_motd.
See LICENSE for details.

All credit for the underlying MOTD functionality belongs to sstallion and contributors to dynamic_motd.