diffplug / diffplug/spotless

spotless-maven-plugin fails with "No valid license found" when using IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate

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Description

Hi Spotless team 👋

**Description:**

I'm using the `spotless-maven-plugin` (`version 2.45.0-SNAPSHOT`) with the IntelliJ IDEA formatter integration on macOS (I'm using 2.45.0-SNAPSHOT, built locally, since there hasn't been a stable release yet that includes IntelliJ (idea) support for Maven.). My IntelliJ version is:

```
IntelliJ IDEA 2025.1.1 (Ultimate Edition)
```

Even though my license is active and the IDE is registered properly (I can use IntelliJ with no issue via GUI), running `mvn spotless:check` fails with the following error:

```
> arguments: [/Users/ozlemulag/Applications/IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate.app/Contents/MacOS/idea, format, -s, /Users/ozlemulag/Applications/ozlemulag/Documents/codestyle_settings.xml, -charset, UTF-8, /private/var/...Temp.java]
> exit code: 7
> stdout: No valid license found
> stderr:
> [JRSAppKitAWT markAppIsDaemon] failed. SetApplicationIsDaemon returned -50
> WARN - CommonProxy - main authenticator is not yet registered
```

Here's my relevant Maven configuration:

```

com.diffplug.spotless
spotless-maven-plugin
2.45.0-SNAPSHOT



check
apply






src/**/*.java


/Users/ozlemulag/Documents/codestyle_settings.xml
false
/Users/ozlemulag/Applications/IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate.app/Contents/MacOS/idea


```

**Additional Notes:**
If I run the formatter manually using format.sh like this:

```
find -name "*.java" -print0 | xargs -0 /Users/ozlemulag/Applications/IntelliJ\ IDEA\ Ultimate.app/Contents/bin/format.sh -s /Users/ozlemulag/Documents/codestyle_settings.xml
```

…then everything works fine. Formatting is applied successfully to all files.

It seems that when Spotless invokes IntelliJ, it is unable to detect the active license.

**Question:**
Is this a known limitation?
Is there a way to allow Spotless to access the IntelliJ license when running via Maven/CLI?

Thanks a lot in advance 🙏
Let me know if you'd like me to try with any debugging flags or extra settings.

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