Maven License Verifier Plugin

Overview

If you are working with Maven it often happens that someone adds a new library to a project cause its needed somehow (or whatevery the reason is). The problem with such cases is: What kind of license does this library have? Is it one of the allowed licenses in the company? Or is it a critical license(for example GPL in commerical environment)?

This plugin can help you in the above situations. It will check the licenses of all artifacts during every build against a list of valid licenses or licenses which should be checked in more detail (warning) or unknown licenses or invalid licenses.

License

Apache License, Version 2.0, January 2004

Issue Tracker

The Issue Tracker

Status

• Reports are created.
• Currently no fail of a build indenpendant of the category. ** Later the default will be: failOnInvalid and failOnUnknown.

TODOs

• Make the reports better.
• http://www.sonatype.com/people/2011/01/how-to-use-aether-in-maven-plugins/
• http://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-maven-classloading.html (Check this!!)

Usage

The first and simplest usage is to configure the Maven Licenses Verifier Plugin

<plugin>
  <groupId>com.soebes.maven.plugins.mlv</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-license-verifier-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>0.4</version>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <phase>test</phase>
      <goals>
        <goal>check</goal>
      </goals>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

Settings Configuration

If you like you can configure an appropriate plugin group in your settings.xml file to make life a little bit easier.

<settings>
  ...
  <pluginGroups>
    <pluginGroup>com.soebes.maven.plugins.mlv</pluginGroup>
  </pluginGroups>
  ...
</settings>

The above setting makes it possible to call the plugin on command line simply:

mvn license-verifier:check

Reporting about Licenses

Examples

A real example can be looked at Maven Licenses Verifier Plugin Example