reuse-lint - Man Page

Verify whether a project is compliant with the REUSE Specification

Synopsis

reuse lint [options]

Description

reuse-lint verifies whether a project is compliant with the REUSE Specification located at https://reuse.software/spec.

Criteria

These are the criteria that the linter checks against.

Bad licenses

Licenses that are found in LICENSES/ that are not found in the SPDX License List or do not start with LicenseRef- are bad licenses.

Deprecated licenses

Licenses whose SPDX License Identifier has been deprecated by SPDX.

Licenses without file extension

These are licenses whose file names are a valid SPDX License Identifier, but which do not have a file extension.

Missing licenses

A license which is referred to in a comment header, but which is not found in the LICENSES/ directory.

Unused licenses

A license found in the LICENSES/ directory, but which is not referred to in any comment header.

Read errors

Not technically a criterion, but files that cannot be read by the operating system are read errors, and need to be fixed.

Files without copyright and license information

Every file needs to have copyright and licensing information associated with it. The REUSE Specification details several ways of doing it. By and large, these are the methods:

Placing tags in the header of the file.
Placing tags in a .license file adjacent to the file.
Putting the information in a REUSE.toml file, which must be in an ancestor directory relative to the file.
Putting the information in the .reuse/dep5 file. (Deprecated)

If a file is found that does not have copyright and/or license information associated with it, then the project is not compliant.

Options

-q, --quiet: Do not print anything to STDOUT.
-j, --json: Output the results of the lint as JSON.
-p, --plain: Output the results of the lint as descriptive text. The text is valid Markdown. This option is the default.
-l, --lines: Output one line per error, prefixed by the file path.
--help: Display help and exit.