reuse is a tool for compliance with the REUSE recommendations.
- Documentation: https://reuse.readthedocs.io and https://reuse.software
- Source code: https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-tool
- PyPI: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/reuse
- REUSE: 3.0
- Python: 3.6+
Copyright and licensing is difficult, especially when reusing software from different projects that are released under various different licenses. REUSE was started by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) to provide a set of recommendations to make licensing your Free Software projects easier. Not only do these recommendations make it easier for you to declare the licenses under which your works are released, but they also make it easier for a computer to understand how your project is licensed.
As a short summary, the recommendations are threefold:
- Choose and provide licenses
- Add copyright and licensing information to each file
- Confirm REUSE compliance
You are recommended to read our tutorial for a step-by-step guide through these three steps. The FAQ covers basic questions about licensing, copyright, and more complex use cases. Advanced users and integrators will find the full specification helpful.
This tool exists to facilitate the developer in complying with the above recommendations.
There are other tools that have a lot more features and functionality surrounding the analysis and inspection of copyright and licenses in software projects. The REUSE helper tool, on the other hand, is solely designed to be a simple tool to assist in compliance with the REUSE recommendations.
In this screencast, we are going to follow the tutorial, making the REUSE example repository compliant.
To install reuse, you need to have the following pieces of software on your computer:
- Python 3.6+
- pip
You then only need to run the following command:
pip3 install --user reuseAfter this, make sure that ~/.local/bin is in your $PATH. On Windows, the
required path for your environment may look like
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python39\Scripts, depending on the Python
version you have installed.
To update reuse, run this command:
pip3 install --user --upgrade reuseFor full functionality, the following pieces of software are recommended:
- Git
- Mercurial 4.3+
There are packages available for easy install on some operating systems. You are welcome to help us package this tool for more distributions!
You can also install this tool from the source code, but we recommend the methods above for easier and more stable updates. Please make sure the requirements for the installation via pip are present on your machine.
python3 setup.py installFirst, read the REUSE tutorial. In a nutshell:
- Put your licenses in the
LICENSES/directory. - Add a comment header to each file that says
SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-or-later, andSPDX-FileCopyrightText: $YEAR $NAME. You can be flexible with the format, just make sure that the line starts withSPDX-FileCopyrightText:. - Verify your work using this tool.
Example of header:
# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2017 Free Software Foundation Europe e.V. <https://fsfe.org>
#
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-SA-4.0
To check against the recommendations, use reuse lint:
~/Projects/reuse-tool $ reuse lint
[...]
Congratulations! Your project is compliant with version 3.0 of the REUSE Specification :-)
This tool can do various more things, detailed in the documentation. Here a short summary:
-
addheader--- Add copyright and/or licensing information to the header of a file. -
download--- Download the specified license into theLICENSES/directory. -
init--- Set up the project for REUSE compliance. -
lint--- Verify the project for REUSE compliance. -
spdx--- Generate an SPDX Document of all files in the project.
The fsfe/reuse Docker image is available on
Docker Hub. With it, you can easily
include REUSE in CI/CD processes. This way, you can check for REUSE compliance
for each build. In our resources for developers
you can learn how to integrate the REUSE tool in Drone, Travis, GitHub, or
GitLab CI.
You can run the helper tool simply by providing the command you want to run
(e.g., lint, spdx). The image's working directory is /data by default. So
if you want to lint a project that is in your current working directory, you can
mount it on the container's /data directory, and tell the tool to lint. That
looks a little like this:
docker run --volume $(pwd):/data fsfe/reuse lintYou can also provide additional arguments, like so:
docker run --volume $(pwd):/data fsfe/reuse --include-submodules spdx -o out.spdxYou can automatically run reuse lint on every commit as a pre-commit hook for
Git. This uses pre-commit. Once you
have it installed, add this to the
.pre-commit-config.yaml in your repository:
repos:
- repo: https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-tool
rev: latest
hooks:
- id: reuseThen run pre-commit install. Now, every time you commit, reuse lint is run
in the background, and will prevent your commit from going through if there was
an error.
- Carmen Bianca Bakker - [email protected]
Any pull requests or suggestions are welcome at https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-tool or via e-mail to one of the maintainers. General inquiries can be sent to [email protected].
Interaction within this project is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct.
Starting local development is very simple, just execute the following commands:
git clone [email protected]:fsfe/reuse-tool.git
cd reuse-tool/
python3 -mvenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
make developYou need to run make develop at least once to set up the virtualenv.
Next, run make help to see the available interactions.
This work is licensed under multiple licences. Because keeping this section up-to-date is challenging, here is a brief summary as of April 2020:
- All original source code is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later.
- All documentation is licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.
- Some configuration and data files are licensed under CC0-1.0.
- Some code borrowed from spdx/tool-python is licensed under Apache-2.0.
For more accurate information, check the individual files.