How to specify Scancode Output Format¶

JSON¶

Currently, scancode’s default behavior is output scan results in .json format. For example, running the command scancode /path/to/target/dir will output scan results in json format to stdout. A command in this format: scancode /path/to/target/dir /path/to/output.json will save the scancode results to the specified json file.

HTML¶

If you want HTML output of scancode results, you can pass either the --format or the --html argument to scancode depending on version. Newer versions of scancode us –html. The following commands will output scan results in a formatted html page or simple web application:

scancode --format html /path/to/target/dir /path/to/output.html
scancode --format html-app /path/to/target/dir /path/to/output.html
scancode --html /path/to/target/dir /path/to/output.html

Custom Output Format¶

While the three built-in output formats are convenient for a verity of use-cases, one may wish to create their own output template which can be passed to the --format argument. Scancode makes this very easy, as it uses the popular Jinja2 template engine. Simply pass the path to the custom template to the --format argument, or drop it in a folder to src/scancode/templates directory.

For example, if I wanted a simple CLI output I would create a template2.html (file name and extension does not matter) with the particular data I wish to see. In this case, I am only interested in the license and copyright data for this particular scan.

## template2.html:
[
    {% if results.license_copyright %}
        {% for location, data in results.license_copyright.items() %}
            {% for row in data %}
  location:"{{ location }}",
  {% if row.what == 'copyright' %}copyright:"{{ row.value|escape }}",{% endif %}
             {% endfor %}
         {% endfor %}
    {% endif %}
]

Now I can run scancode using my newly created template:

$ ./scancode -f template2.html -c samples/ t.json
Scanning files...
  [####################################]  46
Scanning done.

Now are results are saved in t.json and we can easily view them with head t.json:

[
  location:"samples/JGroups/LICENSE",
  copyright:"Copyright (c) 1991, 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.",

  location:"samples/JGroups/LICENSE",
  copyright:"copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation",
]