proper-attribution

Give a proper attribution to the authors of the packages you use.

It will create a NOTICE.md file at the root of your project directory. The file will contain the information necessary to give attribution to the authors of the packages you use.

The information of the packages are:

• name
• version
• homepage url
• repository url
• author
• contributors
• license type
• copy of the license and copyright notice

See the notice of this project for an exemple of what it looks like.

It works with npm and pnpm. I did not test it with yarn, and I won't, because please, for the love of our disk drives, use pnpm.

Installation

Add the package to your project as a dev dependency with

(npm|pnpm) add -D proper-attribution

You can also install it globally, although I wouldn't recommend it for an obvious reason: you won't give any attribution to proper-attribution...

(npm|pnpm) add -g proper-attribution

Usage

The recommended way is to add the file to the files field of your package.json, and the command to your prepack life cycle script. It will be then executed every time you run (npm|pnpm) pack and (npm|pnpm) publish, and the file will be added to the package created.
(please refer to the npm documentation for additional information)

{
  "files": {
    "NOTICE.md"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "prepack": "proper-attribution"
  }
}

If you've installed the package with pnpm as a (dev) dependency, you can execute it from your cli with

pnpm exec proper-attribution

Important

Because it uses node_modules folders, you should be aware of three things:

• For this program to work, all the packages your program uses must be installed, so make sure the node_modules folder is present. If it is not, run (npm|pnpm) install.
• Dev dependencies of your dependencies are not installed (meaning not in your node_modules folder), therefore this program cannot give attribution to these packages.
• Packages that you have previously uninstalled/removed may still be present in the node_modules folder. These packages will be then added to the notice file. To avoid this, you must run (npm|pnpm) prune before running this program.

Options

Usage: proper-attribution [options]

  -V, --version          output the version number
  -o, --output <path>    change the output filename and directory (default: "NOTICE")
  --package-json <path>  specify a `package.json` path (default: "package.json")
  -D, --exclude-dev      exclude dev dependencies (default: false)
  -h, --help             display help for command