ScanCode Toolkit is a collection of code-analysis tools for identifying the origin and composition of a software codebase.
It examines source and binary files for licensing, copyright, package, dependency and vulnerability information. This makes it useful for open source compliance, software composition analysis, due diligence and constructing detailed software inventories. ScanCode is designed for deep scanning rather than simply reading a package manifest, and its licensing engine compares detected material against a substantial collection of known license texts and rules. The toolkit can be operated from the command line or embedded as a Python library.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Detects software licenses in source and binary files.
- Extracts copyright statements and authorship information.
- Identifies package manifests and package metadata.
- Collects direct dependency information from supported package formats.
- Detects known vulnerabilities associated with packages and dependencies.
- Uses detailed license-text matching rather than relying solely on regular expressions or probabilistic matching.
- Supports Package URL identifiers.
- Provides an automated test suite containing more than 30,000 tests.
- Exports scan results as JSON and YAML.
- Produces HTML reports for easier human inspection.
- Can generate CycloneDX and SPDX output.
- Supports custom output generation with Jinja templates.
- Extensible through plugins for scanners, package parsers and output formats.
- Designed for embedding in CI/CD processing pipelines.
- Companion ScanCode.io software provides server-side project and scanning management.
Website: github.com/aboutcode-org/scancode-toolkit
Support:
Developer: AboutCode
License: Apache License 2.0
ScanCode Toolkit is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Software Bills of Materials | |
|---|---|
| Syft | Catalog packages and dependencies in images and filesystems |
| ScanCode Toolkit | Detect licences, copyrights and package metadata in source code |
| ORT | Automate dependency analysis, licence compliance and policy checks |
| SBOM Tool | Create SPDX-compatible component inventories at scale |
| Trivy | Scan containers and filesystems for vulnerabilities and licence issues |
| bom | Create, inspect, transform and validate SPDX manifests |
| CycloneDX CLI | Analyse, merge, convert, sign and validate CycloneDX documents |
| sbomnix | Analyse Nix packages for dependencies, licences and vulnerabilities |
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