lisensor

Lisensor (pronounced licenser) is a tool that automatically adds a license notice to your source file, like this for MIT license:

// SPDX-License-Identifier: [License]
// Copyright (c) [Year] [Holder]

See https://spdx.dev/learn/handling-license-info/ for more information about this format.

For languages such as python, the comment style will automatically be changed to # instead of //. Languages that do not have either of the comment styles are currently not supported. (Feel free to PR).

The CLI usage is:

lisensor [CONFIG] ... [-f]

CONFIG is one of more config file for Lisensor (see below). -f will attempt to automatically fix the files in place.

Config

By default, lisensor looks for Lisensor.toml then lisensor.toml in the current directory if no config files are specified. Paths in the config file are relative to the directory containing the config file, meaning running lisensor from anywhere will resulting in the same outcome.

The config file should contain one table per copyright holder. The table should contain key-value pairs, where the keys are globs (absolute or relative to the directory containing the config file), and the value is any SPDX ID, but the value is not validated.

For example:

[Pistonite]
"**/*.rs" = "MIT"

Inline Config

When the config is small, you can specify it directly in the CLI using the following flags. You cannot use these flags if a config file is specified, or a compatible config is found in the current directory.

lisensor --holder HOLDER --license LICENSE [GLOB_PATTERN] ...

• --holder HOLDER: specify the copyright holder
• --license LICENSE: specify the SPDX ID
• GLOB_PATTERN: specify one or more glob patterns, absolute or resolved from the current directory.

You can only specify one holder and one license type using inline config mode.

Conflict Resolution

If a glob pattern is specified multiple times with a different config, that will be caught and will be reported.

If a file is covered by multiple glob patterns with conflicting configs (such as different copyright holder or different license), check (running without -f) will definitely fail, because it's not possible for one file to satisfy multiple conflicting configs. However, it will not be presented as a conflict, but as a regular license/holder mismatch. The fix mode (running with -f) has an extra check to report an error if a file is covered by conflicting configs. This prevents "fake" successful fixes. However, the fix mode might still edit the file according to one of the configs specified (arbitrarily chosen) before reporting the error.

Line Ending

When checking, any line ending is accepted. When fixing, it will turn the file into UNIX line ending.

When checking, only the license and copyright lines are checked. When fixing, it will add an empty line between the notice and the rest of the file, if there isn't already.