Check all the licenses used in a project

[franciscop]

What's the feature?

Add an easy way to check the licenses of all the packages within your repository with a command:

npm licenses            # Check all the installed package's licenses
npm licenses express    # Check licenses for 'express' and its dependencies
npm licenses -report    # Only show the report instead of the full analysis

I actually implemented it in legally. To try it just replace npm licenses => legally after npm install legally -g.

Possible outputs (currently implemented) are an overview per package, an overview per license and a report with recommendations:

What problem is the feature intended to solve?

Not knowing what license you are able to use because a package might have an incompatible license 3 levels down. Getting NPM to a more enterprise sector by showing that NPM cares about protecting the companies that work with us.

Is the absence of this feature blocking you or your team? If so, how?

No, I released legally which does this, but I think it's an important feature to bring into the core of NPM.

Is this feature similar to an existing feature in another tool?

Yes, it is similar to legally.

Is this a feature you're prepared to implement, with support from the npm CLI team?

Yes, the implementation is mostly done. For my purposes it's working fine, but to release it under NPM I think these would need to be done if it was accepted (and I'm prepared to do it):

1. Testing. There's a bit of testing but most of it has been done manually. It's prepared and set up to be tested so it's just adding more and more cases and searching for extreme situations.
2. Documentation. It's really basic so it'd have to be expanded.
3. Integration. I will probably need help from NPM team to integrate it.
4. Feature definition. I think it'd be a good idea to discuss the scope, features and interface for integrating it with NPM.

[franciscop]

I saw (and commented before) #14236 ; however I think this is different since I'm providing an implementation path while that issue is about the idea in general.

[npm-robot]

We're closing this issue as it has gone thirty days without activity. In our experience if an issue has gone thirty days without any activity then it's unlikely to be addressed. In the case of bug reports, often the underlying issue will be addressed but finding related issues is quite difficult and often incomplete.

If this was a bug report and it is still relevant then we encourage you to open it again as a new issue. If this was a feature request then you should feel free to open it again, or even better open a PR.

For more information about our new issue aging policies and why we've instituted them please see our blog post.