highcharts license incorrectly reported using highcharts-server license URL

[loop-evgeny]

package.json file:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "react-highcharts": "^16.1.0"
  }
}

Run

npm i
license-checker --packages "highcharts@6.2.0"

Output:

└─ highcharts@6.2.0
   ├─ licenses: Custom: https://www.npmjs.com/package/highcharts-server
...

However, node_modules/highcharts/package.json has this:

"license": "https://www.highcharts.com/license"

The difference is significant, because highcharts-server is MIT-licensed, while highcharts has a commercial license.

[joelwkall]

I've been investigating this, and found some interesting tidbits:

• license-checker uses read-installed to traverse the tree of installed packages. read-installed returns a data structure that has a few properties, one of which is readme, another is license.
• If there is no readme, license-checker will read the README.md file of the package and put that string in the readme property of the data returned from read-installed.
• If there is no license or licenses property in the data returned from read-installed, license-checker will use the readme property and look for licenses in there instead, using a bunch of regexes, one of which is an URL regex.
• The README.md file for highcharts@6.2.0 contains a link to https://www.npmjs.com/package/highcharts-server early on.
• My guess is that for some reason, read-installed does not properly return the license property of this package, causing license-checker to grab the incorrect URL from the README.md instead.
• Remaining question is why read-installed does not return the license property of highcharts@6.2.0, even though it clearly has such a property in its package.json