This Gem includes an executable which can be used to detect and diff licenses.
To get a full list of available commands and options, run licensee help
:
Licensee commands:
licensee detect [PATH] # Detect the license of the given project
licensee diff [PATH] # Compare the given license text to a known license
licensee help [COMMAND] # Describe available commands or one specific command
licensee license-path [PATH] # Returns the path to the given project's license file
licensee version # Return the Licensee version
Options:
[--remote], [--no-remote] # Assume PATH is a GitHub owner/repo path
This gem includes an executable which can be run using the licensee detect [PATH]
command,
where [PATH]
is:
- A directory, for example:
licensee detect vendor/gems/activesupport
- A file, for example:
licensee detect LICENSE.txt
- A GitHub repository, for example:
licensee detect https://github.com/facebook/react
If you don't specify any arguments, licensee detect
will just scan the current directory.
In all cases, you'll get an output that looks like:
License: MIT License
Matched files: LICENSE.md, licensee.gemspec
LICENSE.md:
Content hash: 46cdc03462b9af57968df67b450cc4372ac41f53
Attribution: Copyright (c) 2014-2017 Ben Balter
Confidence: 100.00%
Matcher: Licensee::Matchers::Exact
License: MIT License
licensee.gemspec:
Confidence: 90.00%
Matcher: Licensee::Matchers::Gemspec
License: MIT License
Here are the available options:
Usage:
licensee detect [PATH]
Options:
[--json], [--no-json] # Return output as JSON
[--packages], [--no-packages] # Detect licenses in package manager files
# Default: true
[--readme], [--no-readme] # Detect licenses in README files
# Default: true
[--confidence=N] # Confidence threshold
# Default: 98
[--license=LICENSE] # The SPDX ID or key of the license to compare (implies --diff)
[--diff], [--no-diff] # Compare the license to the closest match
[--remote], [--no-remote] # Assume PATH is a GitHub owner/repo path
Note: If you want to parse the command line output for use in another language or tool, it's highly recommended that you use the more stable --json
output then attempting to parse the human-readable output.
You can also compare a given license to a known license.
Usage:
licensee diff [PATH]
Options:
[--license=LICENSE] # The SPDX ID or key of the license to compare
[--remote], [--no-remote] # Assume PATH is a GitHub owner/repo path
Compare the given license text to a known license
Licensee can return the path to a given project's license:
Usage:
licensee license-path [PATH]
Options:
[--remote], [--no-remote] # Assume PATH is a GitHub owner/repo path
Returns the path to the given project's license file