Introduction

The OSS Review Toolkit (ORT) is a FOSS policy automation and orchestration toolkit which you can use to manage your
(open source) software dependencies in a strategic, safe and efficient manner.

You can use it to:

• Generate CycloneDX, SPDX SBOMs, or custom FOSS attribution documentation for your software project
• Automate your FOSS policy using risk-based Policy as Code to do licensing, security vulnerability, InnerSource
  and engineering standards checks for your software project and its dependencies
• Create a source code archive for your software project and its dependencies to comply with certain licenses or have
  your own copy as nothing on the internet is forever
• Correct package metadata or licensing findings yourself, using InnerSource or with the help of the FOSS community

ORT can be used as library (for programmatic use), via a command line interface (for scripted use), or via its CI
integrations. It consists of the following tools which can be combined into a highly customizable pipeline:

• Analyzer - determines the dependencies of projects and
  their metadata, abstracting which package managers or build systems are actually being used.
• Downloader - fetches all source code of the projects and
  their dependencies, abstracting which Version Control System (VCS) or other means are used to retrieve the source
  code.
• Scanner - uses configured source code scanners to detect
  license / copyright findings, abstracting the type of scanner.
• Advisor - retrieves security advisories for used
  dependencies from configured vulnerability data services.
• Evaluator - evaluates custom policy rules along with
  custom license classifications against the data gathered in preceding stages and returns a list of policy violations,
  e.g. to flag license findings.
• Reporter - presents results in various formats such as
  visual reports, Open Source notices or Bill-Of-Materials (BOMs) to easily identify dependencies, licenses, copyrights
  or policy rule violations.
• Notifier - sends result notifications via different channels (like emails
  and / or JIRA tickets).

Also see the list of related tools that help with running ORT.

Documentation

For detailed information see the documentation on the ORT Website.

Installation

System requirements

ORT is being continuously used on Linux, Windows and macOS by the
core development team, so these operating systems are
considered to be well-supported.

To run the ORT binaries (also see Installation from binaries) at least Java 11 is required. Memory and
CPU requirements vary depending on the size and type of project(s) to analyze / scan, but the general recommendation is
to configure Java with 8 GiB of memory and to use a CPU with at least 4 cores.

# This will give the Java Virtual Machine 8GB Memory.
export JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Xmx8g"

If ORT requires external tools in order to analyze a project, these tools are listed by the ort requirements command.
If a package manager is not list listed there, support for it is integrated directly into ORT and does not require any
external tools to be installed.

From binaries

Preliminary binary artifacts for ORT are currently available via
JitPack. Please note that due to limitations with the JitPack build
environment, the reporter is not able to create the Web App report.

From sources

Install the following basic prerequisites:

• Git (any recent version will do).

Then clone this repository.

git clone https://github.com/oss-review-toolkit/ort
# If you intend to run tests, you have to clone the submodules too.
cd ort
git submodule update --init --recursive

Build using Docker

Install the following basic prerequisites:

• Docker 18.09 or later (and ensure its daemon is running).
• Enable BuildKit for
  Docker.

Change into the directory with ORT's source code and run docker build -t ort .. Alternatively, use the script at
scripts/docker_build.sh which also sets the ORT version from the Git revision.

Build natively

Install these additional prerequisites:

• Java Development Kit (JDK) version 11 or later; also remember to set the JAVA_HOME environment variable accordingly.

Change into the directory with ORT's source code and run ./gradlew installDist (on the first run this will bootstrap
Gradle and download all required dependencies).

Basic usage

Depending on how ORT was installed, it can be run in the following ways:

• If the Docker image was built, use

  docker run ort --help
  

  You can find further hints for using ORT with Docker in the documentation.

• If the ORT distribution was built from sources, use

  ./cli/build/install/ort/bin/ort --help
  

• If running directly from sources via Gradle, use

  ./gradlew cli:run --args="--help"
  

  Note that in this case the working directory used by ORT is that of the cli project, not the directory gradlew is
  located in (see https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/6074).

Want to Help or have Questions?

All contributions are welcome. If you are interested in contributing, please read our
contributing guide, and to get quick answers
to any of your questions we recommend you
join our Slack community.

License

Copyright (C) 2017-2023 The ORT Project Authors.

See the LICENSE file in the root of this project for license details.

OSS Review Toolkit (ORT) is a Linux Foundation project and part of
ACT.