License header with changing section

[fwendland]

Hi,
I have a project with special requirements for the license header: They want a section, where contributors are listed.

I've used spotless sofar to generate a license headers. However, it always replaces the list of contributors with the preset from the template. Is there a way to tell spotless that parts of the license header template should be ignored?

---

Current license header template:

/** * Copyright ${"$"}YEAR ABC Inc. All rights reserved. * * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. * You may obtain a copy of the License at * * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 * * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and * limitations under the License. * * Contributors: * - TODO */ // SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 

Sample license header:

/** * Copyright 2025 Fraunhofer AISEC. All rights reserved. * * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. * You may obtain a copy of the License at * * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 * * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and * limitations under the License. * * Contributors: * - John Doe * - Jane Doe */ // SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 

[nedtwigg]

You can do something like:

spotless { toggleOffOn(' * Contributors:\n', ' */\n') // this might work better, it's more specific toggleOffOn(' * Contributors:\n', ' */\n\n// SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0') }

This is the code in the Gradle plugin, maven has equivalents

spotless/plugin-gradle/src/main/java/com/diffplug/gradle/spotless/FormatExtension.java

Lines 1062 to 1069 in 4183935

	public void toggleOffOnRegex(String regex) {
	this.toggleFence = FenceStep.named(FenceStep.defaultToggleName()).regex(regex);
	}
	/** Disables formatting between the given tags. */
	public void toggleOffOn(String off, String on) {
	this.toggleFence = FenceStep.named(FenceStep.defaultToggleName()).openClose(off, on);
	}

Only trouble is that you can't do //spotless:off and //spotless:on with this approach.

[fwendland]

Thank you for your help. Works nicely.

I was experimenting a bit more with the regex until I noticed that I'm limited due to quoting of the regex string. For my use case with a simple pattern this solution works :)