reuse¶

reuse is a tool for compliance with the REUSE recommendations.

Documentation: https://reuse.readthedocs.io and https://reuse.software
Source code: https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-tool
PyPI: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/reuse
REUSE: 3.0
Python: 3.6+

Background¶

Copyright and licensing is difficult, especially when reusing software from different projects that are released under various different licenses. REUSE was started by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) to provide a set of recommendations to make licensing your Free Software projects easier. Not only do these recommendations make it easier for you to declare the licenses under which your works are released, but they also make it easier for a computer to understand how your project is licensed.

As a short summary, the recommendations are threefold:

Choose and provide licenses
Add copyright and licensing information to each file
Confirm REUSE compliance

You are recommended to read our tutorial for a step-by-step guide through these three steps. The FAQ covers basic questions about licensing, copyright, and more complex use cases. Advanced users and integrators will find the full specification helpful.

This tool exists to facilitate the developer in complying with the above recommendations.

There are other tools that have a lot more features and functionality surrounding the analysis and inspection of copyright and licenses in software projects. The REUSE helper tool, on the other hand, is solely designed to be a simple tool to assist in compliance with the REUSE recommendations.

Install¶

Installation via pip¶

To install reuse, you need to have the following pieces of software on your computer:

Python 3.6+
pip

You then only need to run the following command:

pip3 install --user reuse

After this, make sure that ~/.local/bin is in your $PATH.

Installation via package managers¶

There are packages available for easy install on some operating systems. You are welcome to help us package this tool for more distributions!

Arch Linux (AUR): reuse
Fedora: reuse
openSUSE: reuse
GNU Guix: reuse
NixOS: reuse

Installation from source¶

You can also install this tool from the source code, but we recommend the methods above for easier and more stable updates. Please make sure the requirements for the installation via pip are present on your machine.

python3 setup.py install

Usage¶

First, read the REUSE tutorial. In a nutshell:

Put your licenses in the LICENSES/ directory.
Add a comment header to each file that says SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-or-later, and SPDX-FileCopyrightText: $YEAR $NAME. You can be flexible with the format, just make sure that the line starts with SPDX-FileCopyrightText:.
Verify your work using this tool.

To check against the recommendations, use reuse lint:

~/Projects/reuse-tool $ reuse lint
[...]

Congratulations! Your project is compliant with version 3.0 of the REUSE Specification :-)

This tool can do various more things, detailed in the documentation. Here a short summary:

addheader — Add copyright and/or licensing information to the header of a file.
download — Download the specified license into the LICENSES/ directory.
init — Set up the project for REUSE compliance.
lint — Verify the project for REUSE compliance.
spdx — Generate an SPDX Document of all files in the project.

Run in Docker¶

REUSE is simple to include in CI/CD processes. This way, you can check for REUSE compliance for each build. In our resources for developers you can learn how to integrate the REUSE tool in Drone, Travis, or GitLab CI.

Within the fsfe/reuse Docker image available on Docker Hub, you can run the helper tool simply by executing reuse lint. To use the tool on your computer, you can mount your project directory and run reuse lint <path/to/directory>.

Maintainers¶

Carmen Bianca Bakker - carmenbianca@fsfe.org

Contribute¶

Any pull requests or suggestions are welcome at https://github.com/fsfe/reuse-tool or via e-mail to one of the maintainers. General inquiries can be sent to reuse@lists.fsfe.org.

Starting local development is very simple, just execute the following commands:

git clone git@github.com:fsfe/reuse-tool.git
cd reuse-tool/
python3 -mvenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
make develop

You need to run make develop at least once to set up the virtualenv.

Next, run make help to see the available interactions.

License¶

This work is licensed under multiple licences. Because keeping this section up-to-date is challenging, here is a brief summary as of July 2019:

All original source code is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later.
All documentation is licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Some configuration and data files are licensed under CC0-1.0.
Some code borrowed from spdx/tool-python is licensed under Apache-2.0.

For more accurate information, check the individual files.