NPM License Checker

Ever needed to see all the license info for a module and it's dependencies?

It's this easy:

npm install -g license-checker

mkdir foo
cd foo
npm install yui-lint
license-checker

You should see something like this:

├─ [email protected]
│  ├─ repository: http://github.com/chriso/cli
│  └─ licenses: MIT
├─ [email protected]
│  ├─ repository: https://github.com/isaacs/node-glob
│  └─ licenses: UNKNOWN
├─ [email protected]
│  ├─ repository: https://github.com/isaacs/node-graceful-fs
│  └─ licenses: UNKNOWN
├─ [email protected]
│  ├─ repository: https://github.com/isaacs/inherits
│  └─ licenses: UNKNOWN
├─ [email protected]
│  └─ licenses: MIT
├─ [email protected]
│  ├─ repository: https://github.com/isaacs/node-lru-cache
│  └─ licenses: MIT
├─ [email protected]
│  ├─ repository: https://github.com/isaacs/node-lru-cache
│  └─ licenses: MIT
├─ [email protected]
│  ├─ repository: https://github.com/isaacs/minimatch
│  └─ licenses: MIT
├─ [email protected]
│  ├─ repository: https://github.com/isaacs/minimatch
│  └─ licenses: MIT
├─ [email protected]
│  ├─ repository: https://github.com/isaacs/sigmund
│  └─ licenses: UNKNOWN
└─ [email protected]
   ├─ licenses: BSD
      └─ repository: http://github.com/yui/yui-lint

An asterisk next to a license name means that it was deduced from an other file than package.json (README, LICENSE, COPYING, ...) You could see something like this:

└─ [email protected]
   ├─ repository: https://github.com/visionmedia/debug
   └─ licenses: MIT*

Options

• --production only show production dependencies.
• --development only show development dependencies.
• --unknown report guessed licenses as unknown licenses.
• --onlyunknown only list packages with unknown or guessed licenses.
• --json output in json format.
• --csv output in csv format.
• --csvComponentPrefix prefix column for compoment in csv format.
• --out [filepath] write the data to a specific file.
• --customPath to add a custom Format file in JSON
• --exclude [list] exclude modules which licenses are in the comma-separated list from the output
• --relativeLicensePath output the location of the license files as relative paths

Examples

license-checker --json > /path/to/licenses.json
license-checker --csv --out /path/to/licenses.csv
license-checker --unknown
license-checker --customPath customFormatExample.json
license-checker --exclude 'MIT, MIT/X11, BSD, ISC'
license-checker --onlyunknown

Custom format

The --customPath option can be used with CSV to specify the columns. Note that the first column, module_name, will always be used.

When used with JSON format, it will add the specified items to the usual ones.

The available items are the following:

• name
• version
• description
• repository
• publisher
• email
• url
• licenses
• licenseFile
• licenseText
• licenseModified

You can also give default values for each item. See an example in customFormatExample.json.

Requiring

var checker = require('license-checker');

checker.init({
    start: '/path/to/start/looking'
}, function(err, json) {
    if (err) {
        //Handle error
    } else {
        //The sorted json data
    }
});

Debugging

license-checker uses debug for internal logging. There’s two internal markers:

• license-checker:error for errors
• license-checker:log for non-errors

Set the DEBUG environment variable to one of these to see debug output:

$ export DEBUG=license-checker*; license-checker
scanning ./yui-lint
├─ [email protected]
│  ├─ repository: http://github.com/chriso/cli
│  └─ licenses: MIT
# ...

build status