Open Sourcing “Get You a License”

Like most developers, I can be a bit lazy–especially when it comes to putting a license on my open source projects. After years of accumulating projects with unspecified licenses, I figured it was time to fix that. But I didn’t want to go through doing all that manually! As a lazy developer, I know that automation is always the right way to handle mundane tasks.

So, automate is exactly what I did. To make it easier to add licenses to a bunch of repos in a GitHub organization I created the “Get You a License” tool. Check out a demo:

The “Get You a License” tool simply pulls in a list of repos in a GitHub organization, gets the license for each repo (if one exists), and then provides a way to quickly send a Pull Request that adds one.

After creating it for my own projects, I quickly discovered it was more broadly useful. Here at Salesforce, we value contributing to open source and have an open source process that helps make sure all our new open source projects get an appropriate license. But, I found that because there are older projects out there which didn’t go through that process originally, and thus didn’t have the right license, it was still useful to run this tool. Cleaning it up was a snap.

If you’d like to give “Get You a License” a try, it is running here on Heroku: https://get-you-a-license.herokuapp.com. Alternately, you can deploy your very own instance of it by following the instructions in the readme.

Hopefully this is helpful for all you other lazy developers out there. ;) Let me know if you have any questions or feedback!