goebeler / nugetacknowledgementexporter

Exports automatically acknowledgements for all Nuget Packages included in .NET projects

Nuget Acknowledgement Exporter

Small tool responsible for extracting licenses from NuGet packages included in .NET projects.

Usage of Third-Party Libraries usually requires to include licenses within an application. This command-line tool can be used for auto-generating the “Acknowledgement” / “Third-Party Libraries” page in your project.

NugetAcknowledgementsExporter finds all CSPROJs in a directory from the argument, extracts all included NuGet packages and downloads their licenses. Based on gained data it builds two files:

• acknowledgements.txt – text file containing all acknowledgements for NuGet packages. It could be directly included within your application in a scrollable text field.
• project_packages.json – JSON file containing an array of used NuGet packages including downloaded licenses. It could be used to build a more interesting UI for acknowledgements, generated from code based on this file.

Features

• Detecting *.csproj files recursively in project directory
• Extracting NuGet packages from *.csproj
• Extracting NuGet packages from packages.json
• Grouping packages with the same authors, projectUrl and licenseUrl
• Downloading licenses from licenseUrl (included in NuGet nuspec file)
• Adding custom licenses (edit file: licenses/licenses.json)
• Excluding packages (edit file: licenses/exclude.json)
• Including custom packages (edit file: licenses/include.json)
• Windows and MacOS support

Requirements

1. Download latest .NET Core

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/

2. Download latest NuGet commandline tool

Windows: https://www.nuget.org/downloads (+ add to PATH)
MacOS: brew install nuget

Usage

1. Download code:

git clone https://github.com/wojciech-kulik/NugetAcknowledgementExporter.git

2. Restore NuGet packages for all projects. Application uses NuGet cache, so it needs to be there.

3. Build & run:

dotnet run -- <args or --help>

Arguments

Usage: NugetAcknowledgementExporter <project directory> [args]

Available parameters:
	o|output=		directory where generated files will be saved (by default project directory)
	sj|skipJson		skips generating json file with acknowledgements
	st|skipTxt		skips generating text file with acknowledgements
	h|help			shows all available parameters

To add custom licenses or packages please edit:
- licenses/licenses.json
- licenses/include.json
- licenses/exclude.json

Sample command

dotnet run -- "/Users/YYY/repositories/my-project/source" -output="/Users/YYY/Desktop"

or once it's built, you can navigate to binary and run it directly:

MacOS: ./NugetAcknowledgementExporter "/Users/YYY/repositories/my-project/source" -output="/Users/YYY/Desktop"
Windows: NugetAcknowledgementExporter "C:\Users\YYY\repositories\my-project\source" -output="C:\Users\YYY\Desktop"

Sample Output

Plugin.Permissions

Authors: James Montemagno
Project URL: https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/PermissionsPlugin
License URL: https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/PermissionsPlugin/blob/master/LICENSE

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2016 James Montemagno

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), (...)

----------------------------

Plugin.StoreReview

Authors: James Montemagno
Project URL: https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/StoreReviewPlugin
License URL: https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/StoreReviewPlugin/blob/master/LICENSE

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2016 James Montemagno

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), (...)

(...)

TODO

• More testing
• Code refactoring - split Program.cs into classes
• Download and cache nuspec from https://www.nuget.org/api/v2/package/{packageID} instead of relying on NuGet's cache
• Custom templates for acknowledgements.txt
• Recognizing popular URLs with well-known licenses (like already done for: opensource.org/licenses/mit and licenses.nuget.org/mit)
• Automatic run when dotnet restore or nuget restore called (if possible?)