NPM License

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

It's this easy:

npm install -g npm-license

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

You should see something like this:

scanning ./yui-lint
├─ [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

You can also specify --unknown to only show licenses that it can't determine or guessed at (from README)

Also supports --json /path/to/save.json to export the data.

Requiring

var checker = require("npm-license");

checker.init(
  {
    start: "/path/to/start/looking",
  },
  function (json) {
    //The sorted json data
  }
);

Options (Defaults)

Below are the list of defaults and their descriptions. You may pass them either as a module or through the command line (ie. npm-license --depth=3)

{
  unknown: false,          // Boolean: generate only a list of unknown licenses
  start: '.',              // String: path to start the dependency checks
  depth: 'all',            // Number | 'all': how deep to recurse through the dependencies
  include: 'dependencies', // String | Array | 'all': recurse through various types of dependencies (https://npmjs.org/doc/json.html)
  meta: null               // String: path to a metadata json file (see below)
}

Passing in additional metadata

With the meta option, you may pass in the path (relative to cwd) to a json file containing a structure similar to:

{
  "[email protected]": "MIT",
  "[email protected]": "WTFPL",
  "[email protected]": {
    "licenses": ["BSD", "Apache 2.0"]
  },
  "[email protected]": {
    "licenses": "GPL",
    "repository": "http://path/to/repo"
  }
}

Whatever you specify in this file overrides the inspection done by npm-license. This is particularly useful for cases where the license exists for a dependency, but the library wasn't able to pick it up with its usual methods.

History

• Original credit to https://github.com/davglass/license-checker
• Forked from https://github.com/AceMetrix/npm-license version 0.3.4 (see issue)