pack-it-in

A License Manager for Node.js

Overview

Pack-it-in is meant to simplify the process of including FOSS in your project by analysing the licenses of the software you are including within your project and generating an easy to read Excel report detailing the licenses used by each component of your project. There is also no need to worry about analysing your indirect dependencies. The dependencies of your dependencies will automatically be analysed and included within the report.

Written with complex, commercial grade software in mind, pack-it-in was written to be easily configurable in terms of types of licenses permitted for one’s project as well as the format of the report generated. In addition to this type of configuration, there is also rudimentary support for other forms of package analysis. The currently released version includes basic support for handling cryptographic packages, this will be further detailed below where the configuration file is detailed.

Using pack-it-in

To install pack-it-in, Simply run

npm install -g pack-it-in

To run the programme, using the default configuration, you can simply run:

node pack-it-in

This will analyse the project within the current directory, should one exist, and output and the excel report to license-details.xlsx which will be located in the same directory where you ran pack-it-in.

To see an example of the report generated by pack-it-in (coincidentally, the report made for pack-it-in) you can see an example in license-details.xlsx.

As one can observe, there are two spreadsheets generated. The first sheet called "3rd Party" lists all of the runtime dependencies of the project, while the second details any modules which are dependencies only within a development environment (as well as any runtime dependencies of those development dependencies).

If you would like to run the programme using a custom configuration file, one can simply run

node pack-it-in -c path/to/config/file.json

One can also use the longer option and run

node pack-it-in - - config=path/to/config/file.json

NPM Legacy Mode

As of version 0.10 pack-it-in supports npmv8 package-lock files. If you are using an older version of NPM you will have to use the --l or --legacy flag.

Configuration

A commented version of the default configuration file can be found in default-config.jsonc. This file provides a detailed explanation of what each option does and how one can customise the functionality of pack-it-in to their own needs. As the project grows, default-config.jsonc will grow so that it remains fully accurate.

A link to this default config file can be found "HERE"

Contributing

If you would like to contribute to pack-it-in, please reach out to us at [email protected] and we will let you know how you can get involved with the project.