License Scan

Automatically scan the licenses of your project and its dependencies

Quick start

1. Install from npm: npm install -g license-scan
2. Navigate your project directory
3. Scan licenses: license-scan

This will create a license-scan.csv file in the root of your repo that contains all of the packages versions and their respective licenses. You will likely want to commit this file to source control so that you can track when new licenses are added to your project's dependency tree.

Note that this tool reads from package-lock.json as well as from node_modules. For the best experience, please ensure that you are running the latest version of npm and have recently run npm ci.

Configuration

You can configure the scan by adding a .licenserc file that contains json formatted data. The scan will look for this config file in the current directory, any of its parent directories, or any other place that "rc" files are normally stored.

Whitelist

You can add an array of licenses in the optional whitelist property. If the whitelist property is present, then any package version with a license NOT in the whitelist will cause the scan to exit with a non-zero code. The .csv output file will be generated even if the file exits with a non-zero code. Note that licenses are evalated by exact case-sensitive string matching. If the whitelist property is present then the optional blacklist property is ignored.

Example:

{
  "whitelist": [
    "BSD",
    "BSD-2-Clause",
    "BSD-3-Clause",
    "BSD-3-Clause OR MIT",
    "MIT"
  ]
}

Blacklist

If a whitelist is not specified, then you can add an array of licenses to the optional blacklist property. Any package version with a license in the blacklist will cause the scan to exit with a non-zero code. The .csv output file will be generated even if the file exits with a non-zero code. Note that licenses are evalated by exact case-sensitive string matching. If the whitelist property is present then the optional blacklist property is ignored.

Example:

{
  "blacklist": ["GPL", "GPL-2.0"]
}

Defaults

This scan looks at the package.json files to determine the license for the particular package version. Occasionally packages do not disclose their licenses in this way. You can add an optional defaults property that provides the license for a specific version of a package. Note that if the package.json for the specific package version DOES include the license, then this value is ignored. If a dependecy does not disclose its license via the package.json file or the defaults property, then the scan will exit with a non-zero code.

Example:

{
  "defaults": {
    "[email protected]": "MIT"
  }
}

Output

A different output file can be specified with the optional output property. If this property is not set, then the default license-scan.csv is used.

Example:

{
  "output": "package-licenses.csv"
}

How to:

Build and run from source

1. Build the code: npm run build
2. Run it! npm start

Disclaimer

Software licensing can be complicated. The examples used in this project do not endorse or discourage the use of any license. Use of this tool does not constitute legal advice or legal services.