Alpha 2 Software: ATR is available as Alpha software. You can test the release process. Actual releases can be downloaded and committed to svn.

2.3. License checks

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Sections:

Check selection

When you configure a release, you can choose which checks run on source artifacts:

  • Lightweight only: Run just the lightweight check.
  • RAT only: Run just the Apache RAT check.
  • Both: Run both (the default).

Binary artifacts are always checked with the lightweight check. You can't turn this off.

Automatically excluded patterns

These file patterns are automatically treated as "generated" and are ignored by both the RAT check and the lightweight check:

  • **/*.bundle.js
  • **/*.chunk.js
  • **/*.css.map
  • **/*.js.map
  • **/*.min.css
  • **/*.min.js
  • **/*.min.map

Apache RAT check

The Apache RAT (Release Audit Tool) scans every file in the archive.

Standard exclusions

If you don't provide a custom exclusion file, RAT uses a default config that excludes:

  • Standard SCM directories (like .git, .svn)
  • IDE configuration files

Custom exclusions

You can define your own exclusions by adding a .rat-excludes file to the archive.

[!IMPORTANT] If a .rat-excludes file exists, the standard exclusions are ignored.

Scan root behavior: You can only have one .rat-excludes file. The folder it's in becomes the scan root.

  • Everything you want checked must be inside this scan root (or subfolders).
  • Files outside this root might cause errors or get ignored in weird ways. It's best to just put .rat-excludes at the very top of your archive.

Lightweight license check

This check looks at source files to see if they have valid license headers.

Content-based exclusions

Files are skipped (considered generated) if the first 4KB of the file contains one of these markers:

  • Generated By:JJTree
  • Generated By:JavaCC

Included file types

Unlike RAT, the lightweight check uses an allowlist of file extensions (e.g., .js, .py, .java, etc.). If a file extension isn't in the list, it gets ignored by default.

Project policy exclusions

On top of file-based exclusions, you can configure exclusions right in the ATR web interface. When editing a project, look for the License Check Exclusions fields:

  • RAT Exclusions: newline-separated patterns to exclude from RAT checks.
  • Lightweight Exclusions: newline-separated patterns to exclude from lightweight checks.

These settings follow the project, not the artifact.