Natural Born Coder

NetBeans License Magic

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by

doozer
in

As a general rule I don’t include license information at the top of each source file (I’m sure a lawyer would be outraged)  because no one but me should ever see the source. I’ve recently started work on an open source project though so I thought I’d best investigate how to get NetBeans to automatically include some Apache 2.0 license blurb at the top of each source file.

All my projects use Maven so when I turned up this page on defining a project license my heart sank a little. I really couldn’t be bothered to add the license manually each time. Fortunately I quickly discovered that NetBeans has pretty good support for licenses specified in the Maven pom.xml file.

The first thing to do is include a licenses block in your pom file. This is used when building the site to display the license text:

<licenses>
  <license>
    <name>Apache 2</name>
    <url>http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt</url>
    <distribution>repo</distribution>
    <comments>A business-friendly OSS license</comments>
  </license>
</licenses>

Additionally you will want to include a NetBeans hint property to tell it to include the appropriate header text:

<properties>
    <netbeans.hint.license>apache20</netbeans.hint.license>
</properties>

The name that you specify for the license has to be one defined under Tools > Templates > Licenses. Remove the extension and the license- prefix.

References