Batch License Header Injector for Source Code

Automatically prepend license text to multiple codebase files to ensure legal compliance across your project. This tool takes a license string and a list of file paths/contents, returning the updated files with a properly formatted blank line separating the license from your original code.

Automatically prepend license text to multiple source code files to ensure consistent legal compliance across your entire codebase. Rather than manually editing every file or writing custom scripts, this Actor takes your license string and a batch of file paths with their contents, returning each file with the license cleanly prepended and properly separated from the original code.

Use Cases

• Open-Source Project Onboarding: When transitioning a proprietary project to open-source, you can retroactively add an MIT, Apache 2.0, or GPL license header to every source file in a single batch operation, ensuring no file is missed.
• Legal Re-licensing of Existing Repositories: If your organization updates its standard license (for example, switching from one corporate license to another), you can re-process the entire codebase in one call to propagate the new header uniformly.
• Multi-file Code Generation Pipelines: Code generators that emit many files at once can pipe each generated file's path and content through this Actor to ensure every newly created file ships with the required attribution and copyright notice.
• Enforcing Company-wide License Standards: DevOps and compliance teams can use this Actor as a final post-processing step in CI/CD pipelines to verify that all source files carry the mandated corporate license header before artifacts are published.
• Batch Header Updates for Repositories Acquired or Merged: When absorbing another codebase, you can prepend your organization's license to every file in the acquired project in a single batch rather than opening each file individually.

How It Works

The Actor receives a JSON payload containing a license string and a files array, where each element is an object with a path and a content field. It iterates through every file in the array and, if a non-empty license is provided, constructs the new file content by right-stripping trailing newlines from the license text and concatenating it with a blank line separator followed by the original content. Files with an empty license string are returned unchanged. Finally, the Actor returns a modified_files array containing each file's path alongside its newly prepended content, ready to be written back to disk or passed downstream.

Usage on Apify

Run it directly from the Apify Console ("Start"/"Try for free"), or call it via the API:

POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/add-license-information-to-codebase/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>
Content-Type: application/json
{}

Pricing

Pay-per-event, billed automatically by Apify -- no separate account or payment step:

• Actor start: $0.00005 per GB of memory (minimum one event per run)
• Result: $0.005 per item returned -- this is the primary, usage-based charge

Also independently available at $0.0100 USDC (Base) per call via the x402 payment protocol (POST /tools/add-license-information-to-codebase) for callers outside the Apify platform.

Example output

Real output captured from this tool's own build-time smoke test (input above):

{
  "modified_files": []
}