A typical software project often reuses hundreds of third-party packages. License and origin information is often scattered, not easy to find and not normalized: ScanCode discovers and normalizes this data for you.
ScanCode is a suite of command line utilities to reliably scan a codebase for license, copyright, package manifests and direct dependencies and other interesting origin and licensing information discovered in source and binary code files.
ScanCode is used by several projects and organizations such as the Eclipse Foundation, Here.com Open Source Review Toolkit, ClearlyDefined and RedHat Fabric8 analytics.
ScanCode provides comprehensive scan results that you can save as JSON, HTML, CSV or SPDX. And you can use the companion AboutCode Manager GUI app to review, search and display scan results, statistics and graphics.
ScanCode is programed primarily in Python (with some C/C++ when performance is critical). License and copyright detection use multiple techniques borrowed from NLP, ML and information retrieval such as feature extraction, probabilistic searches using inverted indexes, multi-patterns automatons and multiple local sequence alignments for comprehensive, accurate and reasonably fast scanning. ScanCode is easily extensible with plugins to contribute new and improved scanner, data summarization and outputs.
As a command line application returning JSON, ScanCode is easy to integrate in a code analysis pipeline and Ci/CD.
We are continuously working on new features, such as detecting more package manifests or improving scanning accuracy and performance and welcome contributions.
See our roadmap for upcoming features: https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/wiki/Roadmap
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Install Python 2.7 then download and extract the latest ScanCode release https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/releases/
Then run ./scancode -h for help.
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/2.7.14/python-2.7.14.msi
On macOS, install Python 2.7 from https://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.14/python-2.7.14-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 14.04 and 16.04 use:
sudo apt-get install python-dev bzip2 xz-utils zlib1g libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev - On Debian and Debian-based distros use:
sudo apt-get install python-dev libbz2-1.0 xz-utils zlib1g libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev - On RPM distros use:
sudo yum install python-devel zlib bzip2-libs xz-libs libxml2-devel libxslt-devel - On Fedora 22 and later use:
sudo dnf install python-devel zlib bzip2-libs xz-libs libxml2-devel libxslt-devel
- On Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 use:
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
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
https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/wiki
See also https://aboutcode.org for related companion projects and tools.
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/
- a mailing list at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/aboutcode-discuss
- 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
- 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.