Apache Rat is developed by the Apache Creadur project of the Apache Software Foundation. Join us at https://creadur.apache.org and read more about Apache Rat at https://creadur.apache.org/rat.
Release Audit Tool (Rat) is a tool to improve accuracy and efficiency when checking releases. It is heuristic in nature: making guesses about possible problems. It will produce false positives and cannot find every possible issue with a release. It's reports require interpretation.
Rat was developed in response to a need felt in the Apache Incubator to be able to review releases for the most common faults less labour intensively. It is therefore highly tuned to the Apache style of releases.
Rat is intended to be self documenting: reports should include introductory material describing their function. Building Rat describes how to run Rat. Running Rat describes the options available. These release notes describe the current state of Rat.
A good way to use Rat is to through the source. This allows the code base to be easily patched for example to add new generated file matchers. The main jar is runnable and self-documenting. This jar is available as a standard alone binary.
Rat includes a task library for Ant 1.7. This allows Rat reports to be run against a wide variety of resources. See ant-task-examples.xml. To use the Ant tasks, Apache Ant 1.7 is required. See https://ant.apache.org/.
For Maven builds, the plugin is recommended.
In response to demands from project quality tool developers, Rat is available as a library (rat-lib jar) suitable for inclusion in tools. Note that binary compatibility is not guaranteed between 0.x releases. The XML output format is not yet in it's final form and so library users are recommended to either use the supplied stylesheets or keep in close touch with the code.
Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file to You 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.