notalawyer

NOTE: notalawyer does not provide legal advice, and the developers of notalawyer will not be held responsible for any events that occur as a result of using notalawyer.

notalawyer embeds the license notices of your dependencies into your binary at build time and prints them at runtime behind a --license-notice flag. Licenses are gathered with cargo-about used as a library, so the cargo about binary does not need to be installed.

It comes in three crates:

• notalawyer — the include_notice! macro that embeds the generated notice.
• notalawyer-clap — clap integration: ParseExt::parse_with_license_notice, which adds the --license-notice flag (and re-exports include_notice!).
• notalawyer-build — the build() helper to call from build.rs.

Usage

Add the crates (notalawyer-build is a build dependency):

$ cargo add notalawyer notalawyer-clap
$ cargo add --build notalawyer-build

about.toml is cargo-about's configuration file — notalawyer uses it as-is. Add one next to Cargo.toml listing the accepted licenses:

# about.toml
accepted = ["Apache-2.0", "MIT", "Unicode-DFS-2016"]

Call notalawyer_build::build() from build.rs:

// build.rs
fn main() {
    notalawyer_build::build();
}

Then parse your args with parse_with_license_notice instead of parse:

// src/main.rs
use clap::Parser;
use notalawyer_clap::*;

#[derive(Parser)]
struct Args { /* ... */ }

fn main() {
    let args = Args::parse_with_license_notice(include_notice!());
}

Running with --license-notice prints the notices and exits; otherwise parsing proceeds as usual. See the example/ directory for a complete, working setup.