Citation File Format Maven plugin

This is a helper plugin to create a CFF file for a Maven project. You can generate the citation file of this project by executing

mvn install && mvn cff:create

Goals

cff:create
cff:third-party-folder
Common parameters
- Curated reference templates

cff:create

mvn cff:create

Create Citation File Format with references from the dependencies defined via Maven. The third-party references will be generated by multiple sources, e.g. the Maven metadata or OSGI manifest entries. For artifacts, which are located in a P2 repository and mapped to Maven by Eclipse Tycho, heuristics can be applied to find a corresponding Maven Central artifact or query the Clearly Defined REST API if the artifact is known in their curated database.

Parameter	Default Value	Description
`input`	<empty>	A CFF input file that will be extended. E.g. if you want to add additional information to the CFF file that is not automatically generated, you can write this information into the input file and and the plugin will extend the input file with new information, but will not override existing existing entries.
`skipExistingDependencies`	`true`	If `true`, don't replace existing reference entries from the input file.

cff:third-party-folder

Extracts third-party license files like LICENSE.txt, NOTICE or about.html into a folder.

mvn cff:third-party-folder

Parameter	Default Value	Description
`deleteFolder`	`true`	If `true`, deletes the contents of the given third party folder before copying the license files.

Common parameters

The following parameters are accepted by all goals and configure the basic behavior like the artifact resolution heuristics.

Parameter	Default Value	Description
`output`	`${basedir}/CITATION.cff`	The output file
`thirdPartyFolder`	`${basedir}/THIRD-PARTY`	If available, third-party license files like `NOTICE` or `about.html` are added to a
`includeEmail`	`true`	If `true`, include the e-mail information from the Maven metadata into author information.
`referenceTemplates`	<empty>	A list of templates for references that is used as replacement for the automatic generated reference entry. This allows to add curated entries when the automatic heuristics fail or information is incorrect.
subfolder of this folder
`ignoredArtifacts`	<empty>	A list of regular expression patterns of artifact IDs to ignore.
`p2IgnorePatchLevel`	`true`	Ignore any patch level information when applying the heuristics to P2 artifacts
`p2ReconstructGroupId`	`false`	For P2 bundles, try to reconstruct a group ID from the bundle name.

Curated reference templates

Sometimes, it can happen that an information in the meta-data of Maven or the other sources is wrong or incomplete. To allow manually curated reference entries, you can create a template file for the reference using the Handlebars syntax.

To configure reference templates, add the following configuration to the cff-maven-plugin configuration in Maven (either in the pluginsManagement/plugins or build/plugins section).

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.corpus-tools</groupId>
    <artifactId>cff-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>SET VERSION HERE</version>
    <configuration>
        <referenceTemplates>
            <referenceTemplate>
                <pattern>.*:aopalliance:.*</pattern>
                <template>cff-templates/aop.yml</template>
            </referenceTemplate>
        </referenceTemplates>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

A single reference pattern configuration consists of two parts:

the pattern which is a regular expression the whole Maven Artifact ID (including group ID and version)
a path to the template file. You can add several <referenceTemplate> entries to the list. The first pattern that matches will be used.

The template file itself is a YAML file where you can use Handlebar expressions using the Maven Artifact POJO as context as in the following example with {{artifactId}} or {{version}} expressions that directly map to the corresponding fields of the Artififact POJO: