ScanCode toolkit

A typical software project often reuses hundreds of third-party packages. License and origin information is not always easy to find and not normalized: ScanCode discovers and normalizes this data for you.

Why is ScanCode better?

• As a standalone command line tool, ScanCode is easy to install, run and embed in your CI/CD processing pipeline. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.
• ScanCode is used by several projects and organizations such as the Eclipse Foundation, OpenEmbedded.org, the FSF, OSS Review Toolkit, ClearlyDefined.io, RedHat Fabric8 analytics and many more.
• ScanCode detects licenses, copyrights, package manifests and direct dependencies and more both in source code and binary files.
• ScanCode provides the most accurate license detection engine and does a full comparison (aka. diff or red line) between a database of license texts and your code instead of relying only on regex patterns or probabilistic search, edit distance or machine learning.
• Written in Python, ScanCode is easy to extend with plugins to contribute new and improved scanners, data summarization, package manifest parsers and new outputs.
• You can save your scan results as JSON, HTML, CSV or SPDX. And you can use the companion ScanCode workbench GUI app to review and display scan results, statistics and graphics.
• ScanCode is actively maintained, has a growing community of users.
• ScanCode is heavily tested with an automated test suite of over 8000 tests.

See our roadmap for upcoming features: https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/wiki/Roadmap

Build and tests status

Branch	Coverage	Linux/macOS	Windows
Master
Develop

Quick Start

Install Python 2.7 then download and extract the latest ScanCode release from https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/releases/

Then run ./scancode -h for help.

Installation

Pre-requisites:

• On Windows, please follow the Comprehensive Installation instructions. Make sure you use Python 2.7 32 bits from https://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.15/python-2.7.15.msi

• On macOS, install Python 2.7 from https://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.15/python-2.7.15-macosx10.6.pkg

  Next, download and extract the latest ScanCode release from https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/releases/

• On Linux install the Python 2.7 "devel" and these packages using your distribution package manager:

  • On Ubuntu 14, 16 and 18 use: sudo apt-get install python-dev xz-utils zlib1g libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev bzip2
  • On Debian and Debian-based distros use: sudo apt-get install python-dev xz-utils zlib1g libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libbz2-1.0
  • On RPM distros use: sudo yum install python-devel xz-libs zlib libxml2-devel libxslt-devel bzip2-libs
  • On Fedora 22 and later use: sudo dnf install python-devel xz-libs zlib libxml2-devel libxslt-devel bzip2-libs

• See also the Comprehensive Installation instructions for additional instructions.

Next, download and extract the latest ScanCode release from https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/releases/

Open a terminal window and then cd to the extracted ScanCode directory and run this command to display help. ScanCode will self-configure if needed:

./scancode --help

You can run an example scan printed on screen as JSON:

./scancode -clip --json-pp - samples

See more command examples:

./scancode --examples

Archives extraction

The archives that exist in a codebase must be extracted before running a scan: ScanCode does not extract files from tarballs, zip files, etc. as part of the scan. The bundled utility extractcode is a mostly-universal archive extractor. For example, this command will recursively extract the mytar.tar.bz2 tarball in the mytar.tar.bz2-extract directory:

./extractcode mytar.tar.bz2

Documentation & FAQ

https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/wiki

See also https://aboutcode.org for related companion projects and tools.

Support

If you have a problem, a suggestion or found a bug, please enter a ticket at: https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/issues

For discussions and chats, we have:

• an official Gitter channel for web-based chats at https://gitter.im/aboutcode-org/discuss Gitter is also accessible via an IRC bridge at https://irc.gitter.im/
• an official #aboutcode IRC channel on freenode (server chat.freenode.net). This channel receives build and commit notifications and can be a tad noisy. You can use your favorite IRC client or use the web chat at https://webchat.freenode.net/

Source code and downloads

• https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit.git
• https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/releases
• https://pypi.org/project/scancode-toolkit/
• https://github.com/nexB/scancode-thirdparty-src.git

License

• Apache-2.0 with an acknowledgement required to accompany the scan output.
• Public domain CC-0 for reference datasets.
• Multiple licenses (GPL2/3, LGPL, MIT, BSD, etc.) for third-party components.

See the NOTICE file and the .ABOUT files that document the origin and license of the third-party code used in ScanCode for more details.