License year updater

This script will parse license file(s) passed to it and update the years.

Example 1 - updating the end year:

-Copyright (c) 1998-2019 John Doe <[email protected]>
+Copyright (c) 1998-2020 John Doe <[email protected]>

 Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
 of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal

Example 2 - adding the end year:

-Copyright (c) 2019 John Doe <[email protected]>
+Copyright (c) 2019-2020 John Doe <[email protected]>

 Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
 of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal

Example 3 - multiple copyright holders:

-Copyright (c) 2015-2018 John Doe <[email protected]>
-Copyright (c) 2017-2018 Philip J. Fry <[email protected]>
+Copyright (c) 2015-2020 John Doe <[email protected]>
+Copyright (c) 2017-2020 Philip J. Fry <[email protected]>

 Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
 of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal

Usage:

python3 update.py LICENSE.txt LICENSE_2.txt ...

You can specify as many files you want.

GitHub Action

This is an example workflow that will do the following:

• check out the project
• use this script as an action, passing it a license file
• create a pull request

This will occur on January 1st every year at 03:00.

name: Update copyright year in license file

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 3 1 1 *'

jobs:
  run:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Clone project
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Update license year
        uses: p3lim/license-year-updater@v1
        with:
          files: LICENSE.txt

      - name: Create pull request
        uses: peter-evans/create-pull-request@v3
        with:
          title: Update license
          commit-message: Update license
          branch: update-license
          delete-branch: true

If you don't want to wait for Jan 1st every year and would like to run this action immediately, you can manually trigger it with workflow_dispatch in your workflow:

on:
  workflow_dispatch:

With this you can trigger the workflow manually from the workflow page, see this blog post for more information.