update

Use update to create a policy. It gets licence metadata and shows each licence in the dependency tree. It preselects the entries that are already in your configuration. It then writes your choices to [tools.licence_audit] in gleam.toml and preserves comments.

licence_audit update

Update process

See configuration discovery for policy selection and the write target.

1. update resolves the dependency tree and gets licence metadata from Hex.
2. It shows an interactive list of the licences. Existing allow and deny entries are preselected.
3. It writes the result to gleam.toml. Existing comments and formatting do not change.

update preserves scoped policy exceptions and their comments. It does not create, renew, or remove review decisions. Malformed exception configuration returns exit code 2 before the interactive selection or write. Use the audit report to find stale entries and remove them from the configuration.

Successful writes exit 0. Metadata discovery, configuration, TOML edit, and file read/write failures exit 2.

An empty allow selection is saved, including a deny-only policy. update warns that you must add allow rules before running check or check --vulns. Those commands require a non-empty allow list and otherwise exit 2. Report-only use remains available. --quiet suppresses the warning with other progress output.

The command writes a complete temporary file in the configuration directory before an atomic replacement. It preserves file permissions and ownership. A failed write leaves the original intact; forced termination can leave a *.licence-audit-*.tmp file beside it.

On Windows, replacement uses MoveFileExW through Windows PowerShell. Existing owner, group, and access rules apply to the temporary file from creation, before content is written. New policy files allow access only to the current user. Timed-out helpers are terminated and awaited before temporary-file cleanup. The command does not use OTP’s non-atomic Windows rename.

Terminal requirement

update is interactive and requires a TTY:

• It exits 1 on non-interactive stdin (for example, in CI).
• It exits 130 if you cancel.

Note: If you use the escript, Erlang/OTP 28 or later is required for all commands, not only interactive update. Unsupported OTP versions can fail before any command runs. The self-contained native binaries bundle the runtime. See the installation requirements.

After you create a policy, enforce it with licence_audit check.

Flags

Interactively review discovered licences and write an updated [tools.licence_audit] policy to gleam.toml.

Usage:

licence_audit update [--flags]

Flags: