Copyrighter

Copyrighter is a utility that leverages Go's code generator to add a copyright notice to source files. Because a legal notice today keeps the lawyers away.

It recognizes the following source file types:

• Bazel (.bazel)
• C (.c)
• C++ (.cpp)
• C# (.cs)
• CSS (.css)
• Go (.go)
• HTML (.html)
• Java (.java)
• JavaScript (.js)
• PHP (.php)
• PowerShell (.ps1)
• Python (.py)
• Shell (.sh)
• SQL (.sql)
• Terraform (.tf)
• TypeScript (.ts)
• XML (.xml)
• YAML (.yaml, *.yml)

Usage

To install, go get github.com/microbus-io/copyrighter.

Place a copyright.go file in the root of the source code directory tree, with:

• A comment at the top of the file with the copyright or license notice
• A go generate directive
• File matching patterns (optional)
• package and import statements

/*
Copyright 2023 You
All rights reserved
*/

//go:generate go run github.com/microbus-io/copyrighter
// - *.*
// + *.go
// - /vendors/*

package yourpackage

import _ "github.com/microbus-io/copyrighter/i"

Run go generate from the command line in the root directory of the project.

Copyright Notice

The first comment surrounded by /* and */ (on separate lines with nothing else added to those lines) or one where each line starts with // will be recognized as the copyright notice. The special constant YYYY may be used as placeholder for the current year, and yyyy for the year in which the file was last modified.

/*
Copyright 2023-YYYY You
All rights reserved
*/

...

or

// Copyright 2023-yyyy You
// All rights reserved

...

File Matching Patterns

By default, all recognized source file types are processed. To customize which files to process, file matching patterns may be added anywhere in copyright.go. Patterns are executed in the order of their appearance: the last pattern that matches wins.

The following examples excludes all files by default, then re-includes *.go and *.sql files, except in the /vendors directory.

// - *.*
// + *.go
// + *.sql
// - /vendors/*

A - or + is used to indicate if this pattern is an exclusion or inclusion pattern.

Patterns that start with a / are matched to the root directory where copyright.go is located. Otherwise, they are applied to any subdirectory.

The following pattern can be used to exclude hidden files on Unix:

// - .*

The Copyrighter recurses into all descendant subdirectories, except those that contain their own copyright.go file.

Verbose Flag

The -v flag may be added to the go:generate directive to produce verbose output.

//go:generate go run github.com/microbus-io/copyrighter -v

Legal

Copyrighter is released by Microbus LLC under the Apache License 2.0.