licecomb

lice is a great tool for generating license files. licecomb is a tool for ensuring GitHub repositories actually have a license.

Installation

$ pip install licecomb

Usage

Check a well-behaved repo

$ licecomb doismellburning/licecomb
$ echo $?
0

Check a poorly-behaved repo

$ licecomb doismellburning/example_unlicensed_repo
ERROR: Could not find a license file in doismellburning/example_unlicensed_repo
$ echo $?
1

Authenticating to GitHub

$ # Get a Personal Access Token from https://github.com/settings/applications
$ export GITHUB_TOKEN=your_token_here
$ licecomb doismellburning

More verbose output

$ licecomb -v doismellburning/licecomb
SUCCESS: Found a license file in doismellburning/licecomb

Check all of a user/organisation's repos

$ licecomb doismellburning
# TODO Provide sample output

Ignore forked repositories

$ licecomb --ignore-forks doismellburning

Issues

• There are many ways of declaring a license; licecomb does not and cannot track them all (currently only looking for /LICENSE)
  • License in README
  • License in code files
  • There's still the argument that having a /LICENSE file is A Good Thing To Do (there must be a pseudo-standard for this somewhere - it's certainly what GitHub now push at repository creation)