JS License Generator

An application to extract licenses from a JavaScript project.

Usage

Flags

• --directory=<dir> An absolute path to the project directory to search. This directory should contain a node_modules folder.
• --cacheFile=<path> An absolute path to a JSON cache file for looking up missing licenses. The JSON file output by js-license-generator can be fed back in as the cache file.
• --ignore=<name1,name2> Comma separated list of package names to ignore. (e.g. gulp,lodash)
• --production Search for licenses on production dependencies. Default is development.
• --readme Use entire readme as license text (see Priority section).
• --readmeParse Try to grab a section of the readme if it appears license info is contained within (see Priority section).
• --download Attempt to grab the raw license text from known storage URLs via github.
• --help Display CLI help/usage.

Priority for fallbacks

Currently, there is no way to specify priority for what flags should take precedence, so here is a breakdown of the order of operations.

1. Read information from the stored license file in node_modules.
2. Read information from cache for the specified package version.
3. Read information from cache for the package, under a different version.
4. Attempt to download the license file from github (--download flag).
5. Attempt to parse license information from the README body of the package (--readmeParse flag).
6. Attempt to store the entire README as the license information (--readme flag).
7. Save the package name/version and license type (if available) with no license body (fail case).

These steps attempt to minimize clobbering existing cache or better license information when available. The cache is hit only if the raw license data, via the local node_modules package directory, is not available, so that any license information that was previously entered into the cache file does not get replaced by fallbacks.

Output

The output of js-license-generator will flag dependencies that may need attention. If a package with an exact version match is found in the cache, it will be used and a message will be displayed in the console. If a package was found in the cache under a different version, it will be used and a message will be displayed in the console. Using the flags above will also notify (in color!) if a package was obtained using the specified method.

The console will output any packages that have empty license bodies in the output - you can fix these manually in the output <name>.json file and rerun the license generator with --cacheFile=<name.json> until all errors are gone, as a sanity check.