lic

README

lic

Lic is an easily extensible & flexible report generator to statically analyse your local sources and create a report on the fly or upload said report to a server.

• How to build lic
• How to use lic
• Roadmap
• Contribute

How to build lic

Make sure to run go get to install missing dependencies and then just run make to get an executable into the /bin/ folder. If you want to use the executable from your path, you can invoke make install to install the file in the specified $GOBIN location.

How to use lic

To generate your first report invoke lic report golang in the project folder of your choice or specify an absolute path like lic report golang --src $GOPATH/src/github.com/username/repository to run the report in a different folder than the current working directory.

The executable supports various other commands that you can see via the help sub-command (lic help):

Usage:
  lic [command]

Available Commands:
  help        Help about any command
  report      Creates a report of sources
  version     Version of the lic CLI

Flags:
  -h, --help      help for lic
  -v, --verbose   verbose output

Various commands will have sub commands, for example the report command will differentiate with the supported languages (currently only golang).

Usage:
  lic report [command]

Aliases:
  report, r

Available Commands:
  golang      Generates a report of current working directory or specified path

Flags:
  -h, --help   help for report

Global Flags:
  -v, --verbose   verbose output

Roadmap

• Extend language support
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • Typescript
  • ...?
• Report generation
  • richer reports (HTML, JSON)
• Version detection
• Server-side component that receives reports, holds history

Requirements

To not run into early rate-limiting of GitHub's API, the tool requires the LIC_GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN environment variable to be set with the value of a GitHub personal access token, which can be created here: Get a personal access token. The token does not need to have any checkboxes applied and runs with a standard no-permission token.

The git executable is assumed to be on the PATH, so that the tool can get the repositories tags via this command: git describe --tags --always. Future implementations should safeguard this by checking if the tool exists. Current implementation would probably result in an error.

Contribute

This tool should support multiple languages. Currently I'm working on golang. Feel free to chip in or contribute a new language set (I'd be happy to see Java/JavaScript/Typescript). Tests are rare so far, so there's definitely more needed.

The goal of this tool for me to get a reliable list of used software components on any sources I throw at it, to be able to check licenses against whatever licenses I want to use/don't want to use.

The implementation will most likely change over time and is as of now a moving spec. The report might need to have more information to it than I currently foresee.

Also I want to connect this to some sort of CVE search, to be able to tell if I have any vulnerabilities in my code. This doesn't have to be on API level and I can see this as a stretch goal to build a server-side component or re-use an existing tool and format the output the right way, so that result visualization over time, storing of scan results and updates on findings as they become known are a possibility.