liblice

liblice

liblice is a module to detect licenses throughout your entire installed dependency tree.

liblice crawls node_modules, fetches all package.json files, and parses them. It can return the data it fetches in a few different ways, depending on how you want to consume it.

Installation

npm install liblice

Usage

list Output

Returns an array of all licenses – plus any invalid licenses – within the node modules of the passed directory.

const { list } = require('liblice')

list('.') // where the current working directory has node_modules

modules Output

Returns an object of all modules, their license expression, the path to the module, their version, their author, and their conformance information.

const { modules } = require('liblice')

modules('.') // where the current working directory has node_modules

licenses Output

Returns an object the names of every license as a key, with the value being an object of objects that includes:

• All packages that use the license
• Conformance information for that license
• Total number of occurrences of the license

const { licenses }  = require('liblice')

licenses('.') // where the current working directory has node_modules

What is Conformance Information

Conformance information is information that could be useful in the context of license conformance. Specifically, information included is a full list of all individual license IDs in the license expression (often this is identical to the license expression itself, but sometimes it's not), the links to the SPDX-hosted versions of the included licenses, and information that mirrors what can be found in the SPDX license list:

• The osi property, which indicates if all licenses in the license expression are OSI compliant
• The fsf property, which indicates if all licenses in the license expression are FSF compliant
• The fsfAndOSI property, which indicates if all licenses in the license expression are both OSI and FSF compliant
• The includesDeprecated property, which indicates if one or more licenses in the license expression are deprecated IDs.

Caveats

Currently, liblice excludes searching any directory in node_modules that includes /.bin/ since it is a problematic directory and doesn't actually add any value that is not already otherwise derived.

TODOs

• Perhaps detect pacakge.json in passed path as validation?
• Tests. Always tests.