README.md

OSS Licenses Gradle Plugin

This Gradle plugin scans the POM dependencies of a project at compile time. When a Maven POM exists for a direct dependency of the app, the plugin processes the <licenses> element and embeds the link and title of each license in an Android asset in the final app APK.

For Google Play services dependencies, the license info is gathered from third_party_licenses.json and third_party_licenses.txt files in the distributed .aar.

The plugin will generate two text files based on the gathered licenses info:

• third_party_licenses
• third_party_licenses_metadata

and registers them as raw resources so that it can be consumed by the play-services-oss-licenses library.

To Use

Add the Gradle plugin

In your root-level build.gradle make sure you are using the Google Maven repository and add the oss-licenses plugin to your dependencies:

buildscript {
  repositories {
    // ...
    google()  // or maven { url "https://maven.google.com" } for Gradle <= 3
  }
  dependencies {
    // ...
    // Add this line:
    classpath 'com.google.android.gms:oss-licenses-plugin:0.10.5'
  }

In your app-level build.gradle, apply the plugin by adding the following line under the existing apply plugin: 'com.android.application' at the top of the file:

apply plugin: 'com.google.android.gms.oss-licenses-plugin'

Add the library to your app

In the dependencies section of your app-level build.gradle, add a dependency on the oss-licenses library:

implementation 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-oss-licenses:17.0.0'

Displaying license information

When the application builds, the Gradle plugin will process the licenses and add them to the app resources. To easily display them you can trigger an activity provided by the play-services-oss-licenses library at an appropriate point in your app:

import com.google.android.gms.oss.licenses.OssLicensesMenuActivity;

// ...

// When the user selects an option to see the licenses:
startActivity(new Intent(this, OssLicensesMenuActivity.class));

This will display a list of open source libraries that are compiled into the app, whether part of Google Play services or not. Tapping the library name will display additional license information for that library.

Setting the Activity title

You can also set the title of the displayed activity:

OssLicensesMenuActivity.setActivityTitle(getString(R.string.custom_license_title));

Include third party licenses

You may come across the case where libraries don't include the licenses component in the POM file, meaning it will be excluded from the list. To solve this you can create a third_party_licenses directory in the root of your project and include any license file as a plain text file, without the file extension. These files will be included in the list using the file name as the list item's text.