Terminal Based Progress Bar for Java Applications

March 31st, 2019 by Micha Kops

Recently I needed to add a progress bar to a Java based terminal/console application and I used a specific library that I’d like to demonstrate in the following snippet.

Terminal based Progress Bar for Java

Contents

1. Dependencies
2. Sample Application
3. Running the Sample
4. Tutorial Sources
5. Resources

 

Dependencies

Using Maven, we just need to add the following dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>me.tongfei</groupId>
    <artifactId>progressbar</artifactId>
    <version>0.7.3</version>
</dependency>

Sample Application

The application shows how to set up the progress bar and how to advance its status by-one, by a given amount or to a specific number.

package com.hascode.tutorial;
 
import me.tongfei.progressbar.ProgressBar;
 
public class Sample {
 
  public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
    System.out.println("\n");
    try (ProgressBar pb = new ProgressBar("Downloading the internet", 2000)) {
      pb.step();
      Thread.sleep(1_000);
      pb.step();
      Thread.sleep(1_000);
 
      pb.stepBy(248); // step by n
      Thread.sleep(1_000);
 
      pb.stepTo(600); // step directly to n
      Thread.sleep(1_000);
 
      pb.maxHint(2500);
      pb.stepTo(1337);
      pb.stepTo(2500);
      pb.setExtraMessage("Downloading..."); // Set extra message to display at the end of the bar
    }
    System.out.println("we have downloaded the internet ...");
  }
}

Running the Sample

We may now run the sample application e.g. by using Maven like this:

mvn clean compile exec:java -Dexec.mainClass=com.hascode.tutorial.Sample
[..]
 
Downloading the internet 100% │██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████│ 2500/2500 (0:00:04 / 0:00:00) Downloading...
we have downloaded the internet ...
[..]

Depending on the visual style configured the output might look similar to this one:

Progressbar in action

Tutorial Sources

Please feel free to download the tutorial sources from my Bitbucket repository, fork it there or clone it using Git:

git clone https://bitbucket.org/hascode/java-terminal-progressbar-sample.git

Resources

• progressbar library on GitHub
• Project Website

Tags: cli, console, progress-bar, terminal, tools

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 31st, 2019 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

One Response to “Terminal Based Progress Bar for Java Applications”

1. Shaan Says:
   November 18th, 2020 at 6:47 am

   Hi,

   Great article.

   I’m trying to use ctongfei progress bar (https://github.com/ctongfei/progressbar) to show the progress bar in command line for my file upload utility. I implemented as documented and the progress bar is displayed. However, it puts some more characters ? 33m at the beginning of the progress bar and ? 0m at the end of the progress bar(see image). How can I hide or remove these unnecessary characters?

   Display:

   Image Upload 100% │████████████████████│ 100/100 (0:00:43 / 0:00:00)

   My pom.xml:

   me.tongfei
   progressbar
   0.9.0

   Code Snippet:

   try(ProgressBar pb = new ProgressBar(“Image Upload:”, 100)) {

   do {
   try {
   Thread.sleep(100);
   } catch (InterruptedException e) {
   return;
   }
   TransferProgress progress = upload.getProgress();

   long pct = (long) (progress.getPercentTransferred());

   pb.stepTo(pct);

   } while (upload.isDone() == false);

   upload.waitForCompletion();
   if(upload.isDone()) {
   pb.stepTo(1306);
   }

   }
   Any help is appreciated.