This composer plugin allows to define a white- and/or blacklist of licenses packages which will be installed in a project will be validated against. If a forbidden license is found in a package the installation of the particular package will be failed.

Additionally a new composer command check-licenses is provided to list all packages in the dependencies including their license and if it is allowed to use.

Installation procedure follows the general installation process of packages with composer.

Run composer require metasyntactical/composer-plugin-license-check to add the package to the composer.json and install the package.

The composer plugin reacts on extra variables in the extra-section of the composer.json.

{
  "extra": {
    "metasyntactical/composer-plugin-license-check": {
      "allow-list": [],
      "deny-list": [],
      "allowed-packages": []
    }
  }
}

Just specify the allowed or forbidden licenses as array. Use the license identifiers allowed/used in the version-property of the composer.json to be compatible with the general usage.

One may specify additional packages which are allowed despite of license violations.

Important Note: This plugin is licensed under MIT license. Even if you forbid to use MIT licensed packages in your project the plugin itself is the only package it would not complain about (otherwise further checking would not work obviously).