Git-Authorship

Interactive reports showing who wrote each line of code in your git repository.

Why?

Copyright is a thing, and whoever wrote the code in your repository holds an exclusive copyright over it unless an agreement has been made otherwise.

While git-authorship does not help with managing copyright agreements from contributors (see cla-assistant and its corresponding GitHub Action for that functionality), it does help you clearly identify who your contributors are and the exact lines of code they wrote.

To support libraries undergoing re-licensing, git-authorship includes config files for labelling the licenses under which contributors have shared their code.

Quickstart

1. Clone this repository and open it in the included devcontainer.
2. Clone the repository you wish to analyze into the included repo folder.
3. Make copies of the files in the config folder without the dist extension.
4. Run the analyzer with make run
   • The first run will take a while as it computes an accurate git blame for every file in your repository. At the end of the run, a cached blame file will be generated in the build directory to speed up future runs.

Other Features

Author Licenses

If you want to include information about the OSS license offered by each contributor, simply add a line for each author to config/author-licenses.txt in the following format:

author-name|license-SPDX-id

The author-name will be matched to the values shown in the generated authorship report.

A list of SPDX license identifiers can be found here: https://spdx.org/licenses/

Pseudonyms

If certain files are being attributed to an unexpected author (e.g. if a contributor copied code from another project, the blame would show the contributor instead of the original author), you can manually override the blame and licensing information using the config/pseudonyms.txt file. Use one line per override in the following format:

target-path|actual-author|actual-email|license-SPDX-id

All files with a file path containing target-path as a substring will be attributed to the named actual-author under the named software license.

A list of SPDX license identifiers can be found here: https://spdx.org/licenses/

License

Copyright (c) 2022 Joseph Hale, All Rights Reserved

Provided under the terms of the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0