license-compliance GitHub Action

License compliance for Node applications made ultra easy. Provide it a string of licenses or fetch licenses dynamically from an online source.

Uses license-compliance to check if open source packages you are using for production builds have allowed licenses.

Note that you will need to have a package.json file present for this action to run (else it will exit gracefully). The action will install all dependencies before checking, so that the licenses can be accessed.

Setup and usage

There really is not that much to setup! However, if you want your licenses living somewhere else, you will need to provide a service that accepts GET requests. The response must not be deeper than one level (if it is nested, use nested_field explained below).

A hot tip is to use a basic service like Mockachino to serve them, at least as a start. An object that matches the defaults would look like:

{
  "licenseString": "MIT;ISC;0BSD;BSD-2-Clause;BSD-3-Clause;Apache-2.0"
}

Optional input arguments

allow_licenses

A list of allowed licenses. It will default to the very open and generous set of MIT;ISC;0BSD;BSD-2-Clause;BSD-3-Clause;Apache-2.0.

nested_field

If pointing the allow_licenses input to an URL, use this to indicate whether the response will be in a single-level-nested object, such as under allowedLicenses.

exclude_pattern

An exclusion pattern, such as /^@the-project/;some-package.

Example of how to use this action in a workflow

Minimal use-case where you want to just get going with the defaults:

on: [push]

jobs:
  main:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: License compliance check
        uses: mikaelvesavuori/license-compliance-action@v1

If you want a more dynamic setup with the allowed licenses residing somewhere else, then you can do:

on: [push]

jobs:
  main:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: License compliance check
        uses: mikaelvesavuori/license-compliance-action@v1
        with:
          allow_licenses: "https://www.mockachino.com/{{YOUR_RANDOM_STRING}}/licenses"
          nested_field: "licenseString"

Testing and development

To test it locally while developing you will perhaps need to have some non-compliant packages to ensure the script breaks at the right time. Assuming you are not allowing AGPL you can install for example (random package here) npm install eplengine -S.

Then to start the test script run sh test.sh.