📜 cargo-about

Cargo plugin for generating a listing of all of the crates used by a root crate, and the terms under which they are licensed.

Please Note: This is a tool that we use (and like!) and it makes sense to us to release it as open source. However, we can’t take any responsibility for your use of the tool, if it will function correctly or fulfil your needs. No functionality in - or information provided by - cargo-about constitutes legal advice.

Getting started

Installing

cargo install cargo-about

Generate license information for your own project

# Generates `about.toml` and `about.hbs` in your cargo project
cargo about init
# Generate the license information with
cargo about generate about.hbs > license.html

about.toml

[accepted]

Priority list of all the accepted licenses for a project. cargo-about will try to satisfy the licenses in the order that they are declared in this list.

accepted = [
    "Apache-2.0",
    "MIT",
]

[targets]

A list of targets that are actually building for. Crates which are only included via cfg() expressions that don't match one or more of the listed targets will be ignored.

targets = [
    "x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu",
    "x86_64-unknown-linux-musl",
    "x86_64-pc-windows-msvc",
    "x86_64-apple-darwin",
]

ignore-build-dependencies

If true, all crates that are only used as build dependencies will be ignored.

ignore-build-dependencies = true

ignore-dev-dependencies

If true, all crates that are only used as dev dependencies will be ignored.

ignore-dev-dependencies = true

[[DEPENDENCY.additional]]

• root Name of the root folder
• license Name of the license. Has to be parsable from SPDX, see https://spdx.org/licenses/
• license-file The path to the license file where the license is specified
• license-start The starting line number of the license in the specified license file
• license-end The ending line number of the license in the specified license file

# Example
[[physx-sys.additional]]
root = "PhysX"
license = "BSD-3-Clause"
license-file = "PhysX/README.md"
license-start = 3
license-end = 28

[[DEPENDENCY.ignore]]

Sometimes libraries include licenses for example code that you don't want to use.

• license Name of the license that you want to ingore. Has to be parsable from SPDX, see https://spdx.org/licenses/
• license-file The path to the license file where the license is specified

[[imgui-sys.ignore]]
license = "Zlib"
license-file = "third-party/cimgui/imgui/examples/libs/glfw/COPYING.txt"

about.hbs

See handlebars

Variables

• overview A list of LicenseSet
• licenses A list of License

Types

LicenseSet

• count The number of times the license is used
• name The name of the license
• id The id of the license

License

• name The full name of the license
• id The SPDX identifier
• text The license text
• source_path The path of the license
• used_by A list of UsedBy

UsedBy

• crate Metadata for a cargo package
• path Optional path of the dependency that is being used by the license

Example

<ul class="licenses-overview">
    {{#each overview}}
    <li><a href="#{{id}}">{{name}}</a> ({{count}})</li>
    {{/each}}
</ul>

Preview of the default about.hbs

You can view the full license here

FAQ

Unable to satisfy the following licenses

[ERROR] Crate 'aho-corasick': Unable to satisfy [Unlicense OR MIT], with the following accepted licenses [Apache-2.0]

In this case you are missing either MIT or Unlicense as an accepted license in your about.toml

Contributing

We welcome community contributions to this project.

Please read our Contributor Guide for more information on how to get started.

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.