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 :)