Do you know what is LicenseMain task failure in Gradle?
Let me share my experience on what is LicenseMain task failure and how did I resolved it. Since you’re reading this post, it’s safe to assume that you already know about Gradle and use of Copyright License Header. Still, I will like to share a brief about Gradle and Copyright License Header.
What is Gradle?
In short, Gradle is an open source build tool which uses a Groovy-based domain-specific language unlike Maven and Ant which uses XML and is mainly used to automate task.In general it helps in building software faster and does increases developers productivity.
What is Copyright License Header?
Copyright license headers permit other developers to exam the file to perceive the terms of work even when the file is distributed solely, without a license header it is considered that the developer of the file has reserved all rights including right to copy,modify and redistribute.
What does Gradle task do?
A Gradle task is a job that a build performs. There can various types of Gradle task like creating a jar, generating Java-doc etc.
What is LicenseMain task failure in Gradle?
In order to explain this issue I have created a simple Gradle project .
Below is the project structure of my Gradle project.
Every Gradle project contain an important Gradle file mostly know as “build.gradle” .
Note you can use any other name apart from build.gradle , the name of the Gradle file is not restricted. In real time scenario, where you have multiple nested project you can create the Gradle file according to your nested project name
Before starting what is LicenseMain failure, let me explain a bit about build.gradle file.
Below is the code snippet of my “build.gradle” file.
As we know gradle is mainly used to set up common type of projects . Here you can see in the above file how this is achieve.We need to add few plugins to build a particular type of project, that is why few plugins are applied to my project.The task “apply plugin” extends the project’s capabilities.
In my case, you can see a license plugin apart from other java,spring boot and eclipse plugin.
Let me tell you this is the plugin which is responsible for the LicenseMain failure issue. In case your project do not need Copyright License Headers you can simply remove this plugin and its dependency and resolve this issue but that is not the solution as all real time projects needs licensing.
What is License Gradle Plugin?
License Gradle Plugin is mainly used to scan every source set and report warnings. It imposes source files to include a provided header, For example a LICENSE file.This plugin creates format task, which is responsible for properly formatting and applying the specified header. Apart from this, it also reports on the licenses of project’s dependencies.
This License Gradle Plugin has two main task , one for checking the consistency and one to apply the header .
- LicenseMain and LicenseTest (This comes under LicenseCheck task)
- LicenseFormatMain and LicenseFormatTest (This comes under LicenseFormat task)
Now the issue that I faced comes under LicenseCheck task.
Below is the screen of the LicenseMain failed issue due to missing LICENSE file.
This task mainly fails in two cases one if you have not added the LICENSE header file and another if you have not applied the correct header to the source files.
How do we configure the LICENSE file ?
Create a file named LICENSE ,place it under root directory of the project and update the gradle file with this code snippet.
Below is the code snippet of the LICENSE file
Below is the screen of the sample project where the LICENSE file is placed.
Once the LICENSE file is available, add this code snippet to the build.gradle file, license {header rootProject.file(‘LICENSE’)}
Below is the code snippet of the sample project.
Even though the LICENSE file is available, the task LicenseMain failure will still occur but this time the failure will indicate different message.
Below is the screen of the LicenseMain failed issue due to missing LICENSE header in the Application.java file.
In order to resolve this issue, we need to add a License Header to the Application.java file.
Below is the code snippet of the sample project Application.java file.
Note: You must create the LICENSE file without any extension otherwise it will not detect the LICENSE file. In my case, initially I created a LICENSE file with .txt extension and as a result even after adding it to the root folder of the project, I was getting failure message LICENSE header does not exist .
Now you may have certain requirement where you don't want to add the License Header to one of your project’s source file.In my case, I have added a properties file name config.properties under resources folder and I don't want to add a License Header to this file.
In this case, again LicenseMain failure will occur because the config.properties file does not have a license header.
Below is the screen of LicenseMain failure issue of my sample project.
In order to resolve this issue, we need to add this exclude “**/*.properties" code snippet in the build.gradle file. This will exclude all files with .properties extension.
Note: Similarly you exclude group files extension, for example — excludes([“**/*.txt”, “**/*.conf”])
Below is the code snippet of my sample project.
This is one use case scenario that I am trying to explain in this article. Apart from this, there are so many other interesting properties that are available in this license plugin which can help to resolve some other use case scenario. My code is as per Gradle 1.x/2.0, gradle-license-plugin 0.10.0 (and earlier). The higher versions, the code snippet may be little different.
In order to get complete details about license plugin please follow the below link.
Hope this will help my fellow developers to resolve license plugin related issues in there project .
I am just trying to share my experiences and open to questions that will help me to create more valuable resources for other developers.Please share your feedback whoever reads this content, this will in a way encourage me. Also you can post questions if you have more queries.
References: https://github.com/hierynomus/license-gradle-plugin , https://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html and https://gradle.org
