Do you struggle with copyright and licensing in your project? REUSE helps you in three simple steps! Read more on reuse.software and run the short tutorial to learn how to make your copyright and licensing easy and clear.

This action allows users to check for compliance with the REUSE best practices. It is one of many options for projects to include REUSE in their workflows. Please see the help for developers to get an overview.

This action runs the reuse lint command over your repository to check the following information:

• Is copyright and licensing information available for every single file?
• Do license texts exist for all found license identifiers?
• Are there any other problems with detecting copyright and licensing information?

This action uses the REUSE helper tool. For more features, please install the tool locally.

You can include the following lines in your workflow .yml file to run the lint subcommand:

# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2022 Free Software Foundation Europe e.V. <https://fsfe.org>
#
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC0-1.0

name: REUSE Compliance Check

on: [push, pull_request]

jobs:
  reuse-compliance-check:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v4

    - name: REUSE Compliance Check
      uses: fsfe/reuse-action@v5

If you would like to run other subcommands, you could use the following snippet which outputs a the SPDX bill of materials:

    - name: Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v4
    - name: REUSE SPDX SBOM
      uses: fsfe/reuse-action@v5
      with:
        args: spdx

In the same fashion, it is possible to add optional arguments like --include-submodules:

    - name: Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v4
    - name: REUSE Compliance Check
      uses: fsfe/reuse-action@v5
      with:
        args: --include-submodules lint

The major version of this action follows the major version of the REUSE helper tool. Make sure to keep up with the latest major version to benefit from the latest features and be able to spot licensing and copyright issues that we detect with newer versions.

This action itself is REUSE compliant, so copyright and licensing information is stored in every file. As of March 2020, all files are licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later.

Using the REUSE helper tool, you can run reuse spdx to get a full bill of materials.