Nuget Acknowledgement Exporter

Small tool responsible for extracting licenses from NuGet packages included in .NET projects.

Usage of Third-Party Libraries usually requires to include licenses within an application. This command-line tool can be used for auto-generating the “Acknowledgement” / “Third-Party Libraries” page in your project.

NugetAcknowledgementsExporter finds all CSPROJs in a directory from the argument, extracts all included NuGet packages and downloads their licenses. Based on gained data it builds two files:

acknowledgements.txt – text file containing all acknowledgements for NuGet packages. It could be directly included within your application in a scrollable text field.
project_packages.json – JSON file containing an array of used NuGet packages including downloaded licenses. It could be used to build a more interesting UI for acknowledgements, generated from code based on this file.

Features

Detecting *.csproj files recursively in project directory
Extracting NuGet packages from *.csproj
Extracting NuGet packages from packages.json
Grouping packages with the same authors, projectUrl and licenseUrl
Downloading licenses from licenseUrl (included in NuGet nuspec file)
Adding custom licenses (edit file: licenses/licenses.json)
Excluding packages (edit file: licenses/exclude.json)
Including custom packages (edit file: licenses/include.json)
Windows and MacOS support

Requirements

Download latest .NET Core

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/

Download latest NuGet commandline tool

Windows: https://www.nuget.org/downloads (+ add to PATH)
MacOS: brew install nuget

Usage

Download code:

git clone https://github.com/wojciech-kulik/NugetAcknowledgementExporter.git

Restore NuGet packages for all projects. Application uses NuGet cache, so it needs to be there.
Build & run:

dotnet run -- <args or --help>

Arguments

Usage: NugetAcknowledgementExporter <project directory> [args]

Available parameters:
	o|output=		directory where generated files will be saved (by default project directory)
	sj|skipJson		skips generating json file with acknowledgements
	st|skipTxt		skips generating text file with acknowledgements
	h|help			shows all available parameters

To add custom licenses or packages please edit:
- licenses/licenses.json
- licenses/include.json
- licenses/exclude.json

Sample command

dotnet run -- "/Users/YYY/repositories/my-project/source" -output="/Users/YYY/Desktop"

or once it's built, you can navigate to binary and run it directly:

MacOS: ./NugetAcknowledgementExporter "/Users/YYY/repositories/my-project/source" -output="/Users/YYY/Desktop"
Windows: NugetAcknowledgementExporter "C:\Users\YYY\repositories\my-project\source" -output="C:\Users\YYY\Desktop"

Sample Output

Plugin.Permissions

Authors: James Montemagno
Project URL: https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/PermissionsPlugin
License URL: https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/PermissionsPlugin/blob/master/LICENSE

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2016 James Montemagno

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), (...)

----------------------------

Plugin.StoreReview

Authors: James Montemagno
Project URL: https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/StoreReviewPlugin
License URL: https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/StoreReviewPlugin/blob/master/LICENSE

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2016 James Montemagno

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), (...)

(...)

TODO

More testing
Code refactoring - split Program.cs into classes
Download and cache nuspec from https://www.nuget.org/api/v2/package/{packageID} instead of relying on NuGet's cache
Custom templates for acknowledgements.txt
Recognizing popular URLs with well-known licenses (like already done for: opensource.org/licenses/mit and licenses.nuget.org/mit)
Automatic run when dotnet restore or nuget restore called (if possible?)