License Plugin with Git for Gradle

A Gradle plugin that provides tasks that format the copyright using a template and verify if the copyright is correctly applied. In the template, you can specify pre-defined properties for years to be replaced with the creation year, last modified year or the combination of them using Git history. This plugin is based on the original license-maven-plugin-git for Maven.

⚠️ This is not intended to and do not constitute legal advice of any circumstances.

Usage

The plugin provides the following tasks:

• licenseFormat: Updates the copyright in your project files using a template.
• license: Verifies if the copyright is correctly updated.

To run the tasks, include this plugin in your build script:

plugins {
    id 'com.linecorp.gradle.license-git' version '0.1.0'
}

Create a file named LICENSE under the {Project Root}/settings/license_template directory of your project and place the copyright to apply:

Copyright 2023 LY Corporation
Licensed under the Apache License ...

• You can put the file in a different place and specify the path using the license.header property in your build.gradle.

  license {
      header = file('path/to/LICENSE')
  }

Now, you can run the task via the command line:

$ ./gradlew licenseFormat

Configuration

The plugin can be configured using the license closure in your build.gradle file. Here are available configuration options:

• header: the file that has the copyright template.
• headerURI: the URI of the file that has the header template.
• inceptionYear: the inception year of the project.
• includePatterns: the file patterns to include for processing. Defaults to **/*.
• excludePatterns: the file patterns to exclude from processing. Defaults to an empty set.
• ignoreFailures: prevent tasks from stopping the build, defaults to false.
• dryRun: show what would happen if the task was run, defaults to false.
• skipExistingHeaders: whether to skip files that already have a header, which might not be the same as the one in the template. Defaults to false.
• useDefaultMappings: use a long list of standard mapping, defaults to true. See Supported comment types for the complete list.
• mapping: add a mapping between a file extension and a style type.
• strictCheck: be extra strict in the formatting of existing headers, defaults to false.

Copyright year properties

You can use the following properties surrounded by ${} in the template to specify the year.

• license.git.copyrightLastYear: the year of the last change of the present file as seen in git history
• license.git.copyrightYears: the combination of project.inceptionYear and license.git.copyrightLastYear delimited by a dash (-), or just project.inceptionYear if project.inceptionYear is equal to license.git.copyrightLastYear
• license.git.copyrightCreationYear: the year of the first commit of the present file as seen in git history
• license.git.copyrightExistenceYears: similar to license.git.copyrightYears but using license.git.copyrightCreationYear for the first year

For example, if you use the following template:

Copyright ${license.git.copyrightExistenceYears} LY Corporation

and the file was created in 2020 and last modified in 2021, the file's copyright will be:

/*
 * Copyright 2020-2021 LY Corporation
 */