License audit
Making sure that your project license is compatible with the licenses of its dependencies is never an easy task, but this is required for legal purposes. To automate this process and avoid mistakes, you can use License audit currently supported by several Qodana linters:
Linter | Tools supported |
---|---|
Maven and Gradle | |
Composer | |
npm and Yarn | |
pip | |
Go Modules |
This feature is available under the Ultimate Plus license and its trial version.
License audit collects information about project and dependency licenses using configuration files of dependency management tools and files containing license texts. Based on the information collected, it builds the dependency tree containing information about:
The project license
Licenses of project dependencies
Licenses of the dependencies invoked by project dependencies
This tree shows which dependency licenses are (in)compatible with your project license.
For example, a project is licensed under the Apache-2.0 license and uses three dependencies licensed under the MIT, GPL-2.0-only, and Apache-2.0 licenses. This table explains which dependency licenses are compatible with the project license.
Software | Licensed under | Compatible with the project license |
---|---|---|
Project software | Apache-2.0 | — |
Dependency A | MIT | Yes |
Dependency B | GPL-2.0-only | No |
Dependency C | Apache-2.0 | Yes |
tip
You can specify dependency licenses manually using the
dependencyOverrides
option.
note
In case a project root contains several license files, the file with the
LICENSE.*
name receives the highest priority, and License audit uses its text as the project license text.
Depending on the location of license information, the Qodana for JVM linter performs a sequence of steps to find it. First of all, it searches for any license references in the LICENSE.*
files. Next, it scans through the pom.xml
file. If necessary, it then scans through dependency source files. Otherwise, the linter requests the PACKAGE-SEARCH
plugin.
The Qodana for JS linter using npm reads information about project and dependency licenses using configuration files of package management tools. The Qodana for PHP linter also reads license information from the Composer configuration file.
The Qodana for Python, Qodana for Go, and Qodana for JS linter using Yarn require that the LICENSE.*
file in the project root contains the project license.
For all linters except Qodana for JVM, you also need to have project dependencies installed using the bootstrap
option of the qodana.yaml
file.
After Qodana has finished analyzing your project, the results become available in the report.
note
While configuring inspection scopes, make sure that the file containing the build configuration is included in the scope.
To run License audit, enable the CheckDependencyLicenses
inspection.
Below are the qodana.yaml
configuration samples that tell Qodana to install project dependencies and enable License audit:
include:
- name: CheckDependencyLicenses
bootstrap: |+
# Install dependencies
php composer.phar update
include:
- name: CheckDependencyLicenses
bootstrap: |+
# Use npm to install dependencies
npm install
# Install Yarn
npm install -g yarn
# Use Yarn to install dependencies
yarn install --frozen-lockfile
include:
- name: CheckDependencyLicenses
bootstrap: |+
# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt
include:
- name: CheckDependencyLicenses
bootstrap: |+
# Install dependencies
go mod tidy
include:
- name: CheckDependencyLicenses
You can also extend these samples using configuration options described below.
You can use the dependencyIgnores
option to ignore a license of a specific dependency in your project:
dependencyIgnores:
- name: "aapt2-proto"
- name: "dexlib2"
You can override the license matrix and specify the list of dependency licenses that are allowed or prohibited for a specific project license.
In this snippet, the keys
key accepts application licenses, and the allowed
and prohibited
keys accept the lists of allowed and prohibited dependency licenses respectively. As a result, the AGPL-3.0-only
becomes compatible with the AFL-2.0
project license, while the Apache-1.0
dependency license becomes incompatible.
licenseRules:
- keys:
- "AFL-2.0"
allowed:
- "AGPL-3.0-only"
prohibited:
- "Apache-1.0"
All keys from this sample can accept several values:
licenseRules:
- keys:
- "PROPRIETARY-LICENSE"
allowed: ["CC0-1.0", "CPL-1.0", "CC-BY-4.0", "EPL-1.0", "CDDL-1.0"]
You can override a dependency license identifier. This can be useful when a dependency is dual-licensed, and you want to omit some license, or when the license name cannot be detected from the dependency sources correctly.
Using this sample, you can tell Qodana to detect only the CDDL-1.1
and GPL-2.0-with-classpath-exception
licenses for jaxb-runtime
version 2.3.1.
In this sample, url
is optional.
dependencyOverrides:
- name: "jaxb-runtime"
version: "2.3.1"
url: "https://github.com/javaee/jaxb-v2"
licenses:
- key: "CDDL-1.1"
url: "https://github.com/javaee/jaxb-v2/blob/master/LICENSE"
- key: "GPL-2.0-with-classpath-exception"
url: "https://github.com/javaee/jaxb-v2/blob/master/LICENSE"
If you want to include the dependency that should be mentioned in the report but is impossible to detect from the project sources, you can use the customDependencies
key to specify it:
customDependencies:
- name: ".babelrc JSON Schema (.babelrc-schema.json)"
version: "JSON schema for Babel 6+ configuration files"
licenses:
- key: "Apache-2.0"
url: "https://github.com/SchemaStore/schemastore/blob/master/LICENSE"
To view license audit results, in the inspection report click the Project audit tab.

License audit inspection results are grouped into a dependency tree.
If applicable, you can expand a specific dependency to see its dependency tree.
Using Only alerted, you can switch between all project dependencies and dependencies which licenses are incompatible with the project license.
Under Project licenses you can find the list of project licenses. Using License rules, you can view the rules of license compatibility.
You can download the list of dependencies in various formats.
Thanks for your feedback!