Introduction

legal-notice is a command-line tool that lists the copyright holders and licenses of a npm module and its dependencies.

Most open-source licenses allow to use one's work as long as the attribution to the copyright holders and the license they give to their users are included in the derivative work. One way to include this information, proposed for example in the Apache License 2.0, is to write the human-readable copyright attribution and license in a NOTICE file shipped with the distribution. legal-notice generates the content of such a proposed file so you can deliver it with your piece of software.

Alternative approaches, typically implemented in module bundlers, gather this licensing information in source-code comments or humand-and-machine-readable formats like json or csv. legal-notice aims for better visibility and easier access to this information. It is independent from your choice of bundler, if any.

This tool formats to a human-readable text document the output of license-checker. This latter piece of software can be used to generate a short summary of the types of licenses used by your module's dependencies. You can then check whether your license complies with your dependencies' with this compatibility checker.

Installation

To install legal-notice globally, run:

    $ npm install --global @acransac/legal-notice

Within your module, you can install it with:

    $ npm install --save-dev @acransac/legal-notice

Or you can try it directly with:

    $ npx @acransac/legal-notice

Usage

legal-notice does not take any argument but looks for package.json where it is executed from. It writes to the standard output the list of copyright holders and licenses of the module in the current directory and its dependencies.

For example, to write a NOTICE file with the attribution and licensing information, after installing the tool in your module you can run from the directory where your package.json is:

    $ npx legal-notice > NOTICE

Or add a script in package.json:

  ...
  "scripts": {
    "legal": "legal-notice > NOTICE",
    ...
  },

And run it with:

    $ npm run legal

Update the NOTICE after installing, updating or uninstalling any dependency in your module.

Note that you can get help about the tool with:

    $ npx legal-notice --help