/licenseApi

An API to retrieve licenses for your project.

Primary LanguageJavaScriptMIT LicenseMIT

licenseApi

An API to retrieve licenses for your project.

What is it

Simple express API with a postgres DB backend to store the license information. Might eventually convert it to a sqlite DB and run it all in a single container or maybe set it up as a pair of docker containers or something.

The idea is that there could be simple command line apps to make a fetch a license for an existing project, or project generators could call the license api and include a license as part of project generation.

How to run a dev server

  • Requires:

    1. NodeJS > version 8.
    2. a PostgreSQL instance.

  • Run the three scripts in the SQL folder against your postgres instance.

    1. Make sure the password you set in the createNodeUser script matches the one in config/dbConfig.json.
    2. psql -a -U postgres -W -f 001createNodeUser.sql - create the node user.
    3. psql -a -U postgres -W-f 002createDB.sql - create the database.
    4. psql -d licensedata -U postgres -W -a -f 003createTable.sql - create the table and schema in the new database.

  • you can either run a web scraper or use the json data file to set up the DB data.

    1. run the scraper to pull the license data from https://choosealicense.com/. node tools/scraper.js - scrapes the data and puts it into the postgres table.
    2. The preferred way would be to run the json_to_db tool. snode tools/json_to_db.js - uses the json file in data/full_license_info.json to populate the database.

  • start a development server and test.

    1. npm run dev - start the development server on port 3000.
    2. use curl, powershell, insomnia, postman or any other tool to check it is running and sending data.
    3. Get http://localhost:3000/license to get an index of licenses and a url for each.
    4. Get http://localhost:3000/license/:license_name: to get the individual license text and details.
    5. Get parameters like http://localhost:3000/license/:license_name:?name=:your_name:&email=:your_email: can be used to populate the email and fullName fields in the license text.

How could it be used by users

  • Bash and Python:

    curl -s 'http://localhost:3000/license/mit' | \
python3 -c "import sys, json; print(json.load(sys.stdin)['license_text'])" > LICENSE.md

  • Powershell:

    invoke-restmethod -uri 'http://localhost:3000/license/apache-2.0' |
select-object -expandproperty license_text |
out-file LICENSE.md

  • Node/JS:

    const https = require('https')
const fs = require('fs')

let licenseUrl = 'https://os-license-api.herokuapp.com/license/mit'

https.get(licenseUrl, res => {
  let apiData = []

  res.on('data', (dataChunk) => {
    apiData.push(dataChunk)
  })

  res.on('end', () => {
    let data = JSON.parse(apiData.join(''))
    try {
      fs.writeFileSync('./license.md', data.licenseText)
    } catch (err) {
      console.error(err)
    }
  })
})

  • Integrated with tooling. For example, NPM init could pull down the relevent license during the init process.