License audit
Making sure that your project license is compatible with the licenses of its dependencies is never an easy task, but this is required for legal purposes. To automate this process and avoid mistakes, you can use the license audit feature currently supported by several Qodana linters:
Linter | Tools supported |
|---|---|
Maven and Gradle | |
Composer | |
npm and Yarn | |
pip | |
Go Modules | |
This feature is available under the Ultimate Plus license and its trial version and enabled by default.
How it works
License audit collects information about project and dependency licenses using configuration files of dependency management tools and files containing license texts. Based on the information collected, it builds the dependency tree containing information about:
The project license
Licenses of project dependencies
Licenses of the dependencies invoked by project dependencies
This tree shows which dependency licenses are (in)compatible with your project license.
For example, a project is licensed under the Apache-2.0 license and uses three dependencies licensed under the MIT, GPL-2.0-only, and Apache-2.0 licenses. This table explains which dependency licenses are compatible with the project license.
Software | Licensed under | Compatible with the project license |
|---|---|---|
Project software | Apache-2.0 | — |
Dependency A | MIT | Yes |
Dependency B | GPL-2.0-only | No |
Dependency C | Apache-2.0 | Yes |
Depending on the location of license information, the Qodana for JVM linter performs a sequence of steps to find it. First of all, it searches for any license references in the LICENSE.* files. Next, it scans through the pom.xml file. If necessary, it then scans through dependency source files. Otherwise, the linter requests the PACKAGE-SEARCH plugin.
The Qodana for JS linter using npm reads information about project and dependency licenses using configuration files of package management tools. The Qodana for PHP linter also reads license information from the Composer configuration file.
The Qodana for Python, Qodana for Go, and Qodana for JS linter using Yarn require that the LICENSE.* file in the project root contains the project license.
For all linters except Qodana for JVM, you also need to have project dependencies installed using the bootstrap key of the qodana.yaml file.
After Qodana has finished analyzing your project, the results become available in the report.
Run license audit
Starting from version 2024.1 of Qodana, License audit is enabled dy default. You can see inspection results in the License audit tab of the Qodana report. To see them in the Actual problems tab too, in the configuration file enable the raiseLicenseProblems option:
To disable license audit, in the configuration file exclude the CheckDependencyLicenses inspection, for example:
Enable package-search
Starting from version 2024.1 of Qodana, package-search is by default disabled because of inaccurate results and performance issues. To enable package-search, in the configuration file enable the enablePackageSearch option:
Ignore dependencies
In the configuration file, you can use the dependencyIgnores option to ignore a license of a specific dependency in your project:
Allow or prohibit dependency licenses
In the configuration file, you can override the license matrix and specify the list of dependency licenses that are allowed or prohibited for a specific project license.
In this snippet, the keys key accepts application licenses, and the allowed and prohibited keys accept the lists of allowed and prohibited dependency licenses respectively. As a result, the AGPL-3.0-only becomes compatible with the AFL-2.0 project license, while the Apache-1.0 dependency license becomes incompatible.
All keys from this sample can accept several values:
Override a dependency license
In the configuration file, you can override a dependency license identifier. This can be useful when a dependency is dual-licensed, and you want to omit some license, or when the license name cannot be detected from the dependency sources correctly.
Using this sample, you can tell Qodana to detect only the CDDL-1.1 and GPL-2.0-with-classpath-exception licenses for jaxb-runtime version 2.3.1.
In this sample, url is optional.
Create custom dependencies
If you want to include the dependency that should be mentioned in the report but is impossible to detect from the project sources, in the configuration file you can use the customDependencies key to specify it:
Verify data
To view license audit results, in the inspection report click the tab.
License audit inspection results are grouped into a dependency tree.
If applicable, you can expand a specific dependency to see its dependency tree.
Using , you can switch between all project dependencies and dependencies which licenses are incompatible with the project license.
In the section, you can find the list of project, module and dependency licenses. Using , you can view the rules of license compatibility.
You can download the list of licenses in various formats.