LicenseScanner

Utility for scanning a project to determine the licenses used by its dependencies.

Prerequisites

Python 3.7+
Behave (can be installed by running python3 -m pip install behave)
Ninka (can be installed by running ./install-ninka.sh /usr/local)
kss-pyutil (can be installed by running python3 -m pip install kss-pyutil or make install)
pylint (can be installed by running python3 -m pip install pylint)

Format of the Output License File

The license file we create is a JSON file based on the one defined in the GitHub project 'jk1/Gradle-License-Report', but with a few additional fields.

The main fields that we populate are as follows:

moduleName: The name of the prerequisite module.
moduleVersion: (Optional) The version of the module if it can be determined.
moduleLicense: The name of the license used or Unknown if it could not be determined.
moduleUrl: (Optional) Identifies the source of the module if it can be determined.

In addition, we add the following fields:

x-usedBy: Will list all the prerequisites that use this module.
x-spdxId: (Optional) Set if the license can be identified in the SPDX database.
x-isOsiApproved: (Optional) Set to true if SPDX identifies this license type as OSI approved.
x-licenseTextEncoded: (Optional) Full text of the license, base64 encoded.

Format of the Manual Licenses File

If projects need to add licenses manually, generally because they cannot be automatically determined, that is accomplished by creating a Dependencies/manual-licenses.json file. This file will contain an array of the license objects, in the same format as described above. They will be simply copied in, as is, to the output file.

This can also be used to ensure that a dependency is ignored. You may want to ignore a dependency if it something that is only used for development and testing, and hence not released with the product, or perhaps because it is already covered by another license, or perhaps just to group a large number of related dependencies that come from the same source. In any event, you can ignore a dependency by including it in the manual license file with the moduleName set to the name of the module you wish to ignore and the extension field x-ignored set to true.

Commands for Developing

git submodule update --init --recursive is needed after checking out to update the build system
make will perform a local build
make install will install the local build and its dependencies
make check will run all the tests
make analyze will run a static analysis (currently just pylint) on the code

Testing

There are two types of automated testing in this project. Unit tests are used to test various utility methods and are created by adding them in Tests/unit. BDD tests are used to test the overall operation and are added by modifying Tests/features/dependencies.feature.

When a new type of scanner is added, a new test project should be added to Tests/Projects and a new scenario should be added to the BDD tests. This should ensure that the new scanner will work on a simple project of that type.

In addition, a new subproject should be added to Tests/Projects/MultiProject and the multi-project scenarious should be updated, to ensure that the new scanner will also work on projects that are a part of a larger one.

Coding Standards and Procedures

If you are going to contribute to this project, please make yourself familiar with the following standards and procedures.

One note on the CI: For some reason the macOS GitHub VMs always report that no GitHub API calls are available, causing the behave tests to fail. As a result we only run the CI on the Linux VMs. Any changes you create are still required to work on the mac, but the testing must be done on a development machine and not in the CI.

klassen-software-solutions / LicenseScanner