Help for developers
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Licensing should be easy for developers. We provide several tools and services to allow you to concentrate on coding.
Contents: Helper tool, example repositories, REUSE API, CI/CD workflows
REUSE Tool
The REUSE tool assists with achieving and confirming REUSE compliance. It downloads the full license texts, adds copyright and license information to file headers, and contains a linter to identify problems. Eventually, you can generate a software bill of materials.
Read the documentation to learn more about the tool. You will also find a ‘How do I …’ in our FAQ to learn about various tool interactions.
Example repositories
What does a REUSE-compliant project look like? The following repositories are basic, but each of them is REUSE-compliant. We make them available to demonstrate how REUSE works in practice.
- reuse-tutorial-example - a REUSE-compliant repository that matches the example in the tutorial. Includes a non-compliant branch for testing.
- reuse-tool - the helper tool itself is compliant, just like all other REUSE repositories.
Consider registering your project with the REUSE API to include a dynamic compliance badge.
API
The REUSE API helps you to continuously check and display compliance with the REUSE guidelines. You can include a badge indicating the live status in your README file, and parse the output using the generated JSON file.
This is how the badge will look like for a REUSE compliant project. You can click on the badge to see more information:
The API is the perfect tool for everyone who wants to show that their repository follows best practices in providing licensing and copyright information. It allows third-party services to integrate the live REUSE status, and offers a simple alternative for people who do not want to install the REUSE tool for a first quick check.
As everything else in REUSE, the API is publicly available under Free Software licenses.
Pre-commit hook
You 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:
# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2020 Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC0-1.0
repos:
- repo: https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-tool
rev: v4.0.3
hooks:
- id: reuse
Then 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.
Inclusion in CI/CD workflows
REUSE can be easily integrated into your existing CI/CD processes to continuously test your repository and its changes for REUSE compliance.
The FSFE offers a Docker image which can be used in numerous CI solutions. Find a few examples below:
Drone
Include the following snippet in your .drone.yml
file:
# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2020 Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC0-1.0
steps:
- name: reuse
image: fsfe/reuse:latest
More information about Drone on drone.io.
GitHub
GitHub users can integrate the REUSE action in their workflow. Include the
following file as .github/workflows/reuse.yaml
:
# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2020 Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC0-1.0
name: REUSE Compliance Check
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
test:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v4
- name: REUSE Compliance Check
uses: fsfe/reuse-action@v4
Visit the action’s marketplace page for more usage instructions.
More information about GitHub Actions on docs.github.com.
GitLab
Include the following snippet in your .gitlab-ci.yml
file:
# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2020 Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC0-1.0
reuse:
image:
name: fsfe/reuse:latest
entrypoint: [""]
script:
- reuse lint
More information about GitLab’s CI on docs.gitlab.com.
Travis CI
Include the following snippet in your .travis.yml
file:
# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2020 Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC0-1.0
language: minimal
services:
- docker
before_install:
- docker pull fsfe/reuse:latest
- docker run -v ${TRAVIS_BUILD_DIR}:/data fsfe/reuse:latest lint
More information on Travis CI on travis-ci.com.