The license Gradle plugin enforces and manages license headers and notices across a project’s source files. It understands language-specific comment styles and applies templated headers uniformly, helping teams comply with legal and open-source obligations. Typical usage adds a “format” task to insert or update headers, and a “check” task that fails the build when files are missing or contain incorrect licenses. It supports per-module configuration, file globs, and exclusions so generated or vendored code can be handled appropriately. Because it integrates with Gradle’s lifecycle, results appear in standard build reports and can be gated in CI. Over time, it reduces drift in legal metadata and keeps repositories audit-ready with minimal manual effort.
Features
- Scans source files and applies or verifies license headers
- Offers formatting tasks to automatically correct header issues
- Reports on licenses of project dependencies
- Inspired by the Maven counterpart, leveraging similar logic
- Published and maintained up to mid‑2021 (version 0.16.1)
- Known limitations: lacks support for newer Gradle features like task avoidance or configuration caching