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MoonLicense - Gradle

MoonLicense integration into the Gradle build process

Introduction

MoonLicense - Gradle is a plugin for Gradle dedicated to automatically and trasparently:

• create setNotices and removeNotices, tasks that respectively set and remove license notices within the files in a project's directory tree, according to the provided include/exclude regex filters

• introduce a small DSL for simple and expressive configuration

• optionally, create/update/remove a LICENSE file according to the project's license

• optionally, update the licenses tag of the synthesized POM (when the maven standard plugin has been applied), to include an instance of each license employed within the project

The plugin is based on its dedicated Java library - MoonLicense. Please, refer to its README and to its javadocs for a detailed explanation of the underlying model.

Installation

To add MoonLicense-Gradle to your project, just include the following lines:

buildscript {
    repositories {
        maven {
            url "https://dl.bintray.com/giancosta86/Hephaestus"
        }
    }

    dependencies {
        classpath "info.gianlucacosta.moonlicense:moonlicense-gradle:LATEST_VERSION"
    }
}

apply plugin: "info.gianlucacosta.moonlicense"

Basic usage

The basic configuration is as simple as:

moonLicense {
    license = apache2

    productInfo {
        productName = "My product"
        inceptionYear = 2015
        copyrightHolder = "The copyright holder"
    }
}

where:

• license can be one of the keywords referencing the provided licenses (see later), or an instance of a custom implementation of the License interface provided by MoonLicense

• productInfo always requires those basic fields

Intermediate configuration

It is possible to declare:

• includes - which files will be altered by setNotices and removeNotices, and which notice format should be used for each file group. It is basically a (regex string --> NoticeFormat) map

• excludes - a list of regex strings stating which files should be excluded from the set

For example:

moonLicense {
    license = apache2

    productInfo {
        productName = "My product"
        inceptionYear = 2015
        copyrightHolder = "The copyright holder"
    }

    includes = [
      /.*\.html?$/: htmlFormat
    ]

    excludes = ["^alpha/", "^beta/"]
}

In this case, when one of the license-related tasks is run, it will affect only the files (in the project tree) ending with .htm or .html, except those in the first-level folders alpha and beta, which will be ignored; for every file included after these checks, the HTML notice format will be employed.

This is true, but with one caveat: files and directories beginning with "." (dot items) will also be ignored by default (it is described later how to change this behaviour).

IMPORTANT: before being passed to the regular expressions, every path will be made:

• relative to the project's directory - which is why, in the example above, alpha and beta, whose regexes included the ^ anchor, are first-level directories in the project tree

• platform-independent - the Unix-style '/' character is used to separate path components, so as to simplify the regular expressions

Advanced configuration

The moonLicense block can contain an arbitrary number of fileSet blocks, having the following form:

moonLicense {
  ...

  fileSet {
    license = ...
    productInfo{ ... }
    includes = ...
    excludes = ...
  }

  ...
}

A few important considerations:

• Each fileSet block defines a LicensedFileSet object (see MoonLicense's documentation for reference)
• license, productInfo, includes and excludes will apply just as described earlier

IMPORTANT:

• all fileSet blocks are applied sequentially, in FIFO order: when a file matches a fileSet, the related license and product info are applied according to the related format that its includes prescribe for it

• the moonLicense block conceptually behaves like an additional fileSet which is applied after all the other fileSet blocks

Further settings

These settings only apply to the moonLicense block:

• skipDotItems - when true, files and directories whose name starts with "." (a dot) won't be opened

• updateLicenseFile - when true, setNotices will create/update the LICENSE file in the project directory, whereas removeNotices will try to delete it

• updatePom - if it's true and the maven plugin is applied to the project, setNotices will set the licenses tag of the POM, adding one license tag for each distinct license employed by the fileSet blocks (including moonLicense).

Default configuration

For both moonLicense and fileSet blocks:

• includes applies:

  • javaformat to all files ending with: .java, .scala, .groovy, .gradle, .c, .h, .cs, .cpp, .js

  • pascalFormat to all files ending with: .pas, .ml, .mli

  • htmlFormat to all files ending with: .htm, .html

  • xmlFormat to all files ending with: .xml

• excludes defaults to:

  • the build subdirectory, in the case of the moonLicense block
  • an empty list, in the case of a fileSet block

moonLicense also has a few more defaults:

• skipDotItems is true, preventing dot items from being considered

• updateLicenseFile is true

• updatePom is true

Provided licenses

The following keywords can be used to reference a license:

• agpl3
• apache2
• bsd2
• bsd3
• gpl3
• lgpl3
• mit

Don't forget that you can use, for example, the new operator to instantiate your custom licenses based on MoonLicense.

Provided formats

The following keywords introduce the default notice formats:

• javaFormat - for all languages (Java, Scala, Groovy, C, C#, JavaScript, ...) sharing the same /* ... */ long comment format

• pascalFormat - for languages, such as Pascal and OCaml, sharing the same (* ... *) long comment format

• htmlFormat - for HTML files

• xmlFormat - for XML files

In this case as well, you can define your own formats - for both other languages and custom notice outputs - just by using the API provided by MoonLicense.

Special thanks

Special thanks to great tools which I used a lot and which inspired my work:

• License Maven Plugin
• License Gradle Plugin