Licenses

Fork of https://github.com/3rd-Eden/licenses designed to run against pre-fetched node_modules/ instead of fetching info from registry and Github. So you need to do npm install for your main project before using it.

Why fork?

• This approach required a significant rewrite of the logic.
• It was not planned by 3rd-eden (see 3rd-Eden#14 (comment)).

As I needed to fetch data for all devDependencies, and there were often hundreds of them, initial code ran too slow for me.

API differences

The main difference is that licenses() accept an object as the first parameter. The object must have 2 properties:

• path: absolute path to folder with the dependency;
• data: package.json contents for the dependency (you may use e.g. https://github.com/npm/read-package-json or https://github.com/npm/read-package-tree to get the data).

So the call may look like this:

'use strict';

var licenses = require('licenses');

licenses({
  path: 'C:\My Project\node_modules\grunt-contrib-connect\',
  data: {/* package.json contents*/}
}, function fetched(err, license) {
  console.log(license.join(',')); // MIT
});

Or, combined with read-package-tree, like this:

'use strict';

var licenses = require('licenses'),
  readPackageTree = require('read-package-tree');
  
readPackageTree('./node_modules/grunt-contrib-connect', function(err, data) {
  if (err) throw err;
  licences({
    path: data.realpath,
    data: data.package
  }, function fetched(err, license) {
    console.log(license.join(',')); // MIT
  });
});

Getting additional info about licenses

The great thing about the initial licenses module is that it stores a lot of knowledge about existing licenses. To get it, use the static licenses.info() method:

'use strict';

var licenses = require('licenses');

licenses({
  path: 'C:\My Project\node_modules\grunt-contrib-connect\',
  data: {/* package.json contents*/}
}, function fetched(err, license) {
  var info = licenses.info(license[0]/*MIT*/);
  console.log(Object.keys(info)); // id,name,full,url,tldr,file,content
  console.log(info.url); // http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
});

License

MIT