 <p>Glyphicons use a font to display icons, each icon being a character in the font.</p> <p>Therefore it is simple to use them in JButtons.</p> <ol> <li>Create a swing Font for the glyphicon font.</li> <li>Set the font on your JButton.</li> <li>Set the button label to the character of a glyphicon icon. The characters codes can be found for example in bootstrap.css.</li> </ol> <p>Here is a detailed explanation using <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24177348/font-awesome-with-swing">fontawesome</a> instead of glyphicons but the technique is the same.</p>