Any time I have to figure out a new Maven I cringe with sour anticipation. This go ’round is with the maven-license-plugin. All things considered my expectations were pretty low.

This is one of those good news/bad news stories.

The good news is that I was able to get the plugin integration into my Maven structure very quickly. The bad news is that it took me forever to get things going through all of my Modules correctly. In fact, one of the modules is a Grails project - which still isn’t getting its .gsp files checked. Figuring out the “exclusion” list is still a work in progress. But, here’s the deal. The element

doesn’t work through to modules.

So I ended up with something like this:

And according to the docs this:

Should provide the added file extension handling needed for my Grails project. No va. Well, actually it worked once…in typical Maven fashion.

Ok, enough of the negativity. The plugin is awesome. It has the ability to specify a different header for each module, and maps many different comment styles to different language/texts. Just be sure to not use a header that is already commented out. ;) As soon as I resolve my issues I will update.