Why Use ScanCode Toolkit?

ScanCode Toolkit is the leading tool in scanning depth and accuracy, used by hundreds of software teams. You can use ScanCode Toolkit as a command line tool or as a library.

Getting Started

Instructions to get you up and running on your local machine are at Getting Started

The ScanCode Toolkit documentation also provides:

• prerequisites for installing the software.

• instructions guiding you to start scanning code.

• a comprehensive guide to the command line options.

• tutorials that provide hands-on guidance to ScanCode features.

• how to expand ScanCode Licenses and Detection Rules with your own data.

• how to generate Attribution from a ScanCode scan.

• guidelines for contributing to code development.

Build and tests status

We run 30,000+ tests on each commit on multiple CIs to ensure a good platform compabitility with multiple versions of Windows, Linux and macOS.

Benefits of ScanCode

• ScanCode is heavily tested with an automated test suite of over 30,000 tests.

• ScanCode is used by several projects and organizations such as the Eclipse Foundation, OpenEmbedded.org, the FSFE, the FSF, OSS Review Toolkit, ClearlyDefined.io, RedHat Fabric8 analytics, and many more.

• You can also organize and run ScanCode server-side with the companion ScanCode.io web app to organize and store multiple scan projects including scripted scanning pipelines.

• As a standalone command-line tool, ScanCode is easy to install, run, and embed in your CI/CD processing pipeline. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

• ScanCode detects licenses, copyrights, package manifests, direct dependencies, and more both in source code and binary files and is considered as the best-in-class and reference tool in this domain, re-used as the core tools for software composition data collection by several open source tools.

• ScanCode provides the most accurate license detection engine and does a full comparison (also known as diff or red line comparison) between a database of license texts and your code instead of relying only on approximate regex patterns or probabilistic search, edit distance or machine learning.

• Written in Python, ScanCode is easy to extend with plugins to contribute new and improved scanners, data summarization, package manifest parsers, and new outputs.

• You can save your scan results as JSON, YAML, HTML, CycloneDX or SPDX or even create your own format with Jinja templates.

• ScanCode can process packages, build manifest and lockfile formats to collect Package URLs and extract metadata. See all available package parsers for the exhaustive list.

Support

If you have a specific problem, suggestion or bug, please submit a GitHub issue.

For quick questions or socializing, join the AboutCode community discussions on Slack.

Interested in commercial suppport? Contact the AboutCode team.

License

• Apache-2.0 is the overall license.

• CC-BY-4.0 applies to reference datasets.

• There are multiple secondary permissive or copyleft licenses (LGPL, MIT, BSD, GPL 2/3, etc.) for third-party components and test suite code and data.

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.

Acknowledgements, Funding, Support and Sponsoring

This project is funded, supported and sponsored by:

• Generous support and contributions from users like you!

• the European Commission NGI programme

• the NLnet Foundation

• the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI)

• Google, including the Google Summer of Code and the Google Seasons of Doc programmes

• Mercedes-Benz Group

• Microsoft and Microsoft Azure

• AboutCode ASBL

• nexB Inc.

This project was funded through the NGI0 Discovery Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825322.

https://nlnet.nl/project/vulnerabilitydatabase/

This project was funded through the NGI0 Entrust Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 101069594.

https://nlnet.nl/project/Back2source/

This project was funded through the NGI0 Core Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 101092990.

https://nlnet.nl/project/Back2source-next/

This project was funded through the NGI0 Core Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 101092990.

https://nlnet.nl/project/FastScan/

This project was funded through the NGI0 Commons Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 101135429. Additional funding is made available by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).

https://nlnet.nl/project/MassiveFOSSscan/

This project was funded through the NGI0 Entrust Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 101069594.

https://nlnet.nl/project/purl2sym/

End of ScanCode Toolkit README