PyLicenses

Find license types and texts for all installed packages in conda and pip environments, producing a distribution-ready file THIRDPARTY-LICENSES with required details on all packages, including their respective license texts.

Why yet another tool?

There are several packages with similar intents, however I did not find any to match the particular usecase PyLicenses covers. Specifically to produce a complete set of licenses for all installed packages, at the package level (as opposed to the file level as many other such tools do).Also I wanted to have a focused tool that is easily extensible to any framework, in any language.

Features

PyLicense

• produces the THIRDPARTY-LICENSES file as a report on all packages
• collects data from conda, pip, pypi and github to retrieve information on authorship, package homepage, license style and - most importantly - the actual license text.
• uses a pipeline of scanners/data collectors. Adding a new framework to scan (e.g. to include npm modules) is a matter of writing a new PackageProvider class with a single method.
• produces reports and statistics on primary packages (direct dependency) and secondary packages (pulled-in through a dependency), notably this works across conda and pip. Statistics currently include counts per license type.
• highlights packages were the license information or license text is missing
• can map packages to a fixed license URL for packages that do not include the license text or where the LICENSE file is difficult to find by automated means.

How to use

Within your conda or pip virtualenv, run

$ python -m pylicense

To see options

$ python -m pylicense -h
usage: __main__.py [-h] [--github GITHUB] [--stats STATS]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help       show this help message and exit
  --github GITHUB  specify github user,password
  --stats STATS    print statistics

Sample output

See the THIRDPARTY-LICENSES file in this repository for the full license collection report of this package.

The direct output looks something like this

$ python -m pylicense
Packages directly required:

name        author                      license
----------  --------------------------  -----------------------
pylicenses  Patrick Senti               Apache 2.0
wheel       Daniel Holth                Other
urllib3     Andrey Petrov               MIT
tabulate    Sergey Astanin              MIT
sh          Andrew Moffat               MIT
setuptools  Python Packaging Authority  MIT License
requests    Kenneth Reitz               Apache Software License
pip         The pip developers          MIT
certifi     Kenneth Reitz               MPL-2.0
libedit                                 NetBSD
python                                  PSF

Packages pulled in through other requirements:

name             author            license
---------------  ----------------  --------------------------------------
idna             Kim Davies        BSD Like
chardet          Daniel Blanchard  GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1
ca-certificates                    ISC
libffi                             MIT
libgcc-ng                          GPL
libstdcxx-ng                       GPL3 with runtime exception
ncurses                            Free software - X11 License
openssl                            OpenSSL
readline                           GPL3
sqlite                             Public-Domain
xz                                 Public-Domain, GPL
zlib                               zlib

**SUCCESS** Good news. There are no packages without license texts

**SUCCESS** The full license report is available in THIRDPARTY-LICENSES

How to implement a new scanner

1. Add a class in pylicenses.provider, e.g.

    class MyPackageScanner(PackageProvider):
        def get_packages_info(self, packages, subset=None)
            ... your code to update packages ...
            return packages
   

   packages is a dictionary mapping name=>data, where name is either the package's canonical name or the full distribution name (name-version-type), and data is the data collected so far. For programming convenience all mapping of the same package, independent of the key, reference the same data object.

   Currently there are only very few conventions for the contents of data:

   • name is the name of package without version or distribution type
   • dist_name is the full distribution name (name-version or name-version-type)
   • license is the canonical license name (e.g. MIT, Apache-2.0 etc.)
   • license_text is the actual license text
   • license_source is the filename/URL to the source of the license text
   • license_trace is the last scanner to update the data

   Any other data can be stored by the scanners as they see fit. Note the dependency on PackageProvider as a base class is a convenience only.

2. Add the new scanner class to PyLicenses.PROVIDERS

3. Add unit tests

License

MIT License - Copyright (c) 2018 Patrick Senti, productaize.io See LICENSE file