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.

Installation

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. If you intend to run tests, you need to clone with submodules by running git clone --recurse-submodules. If you have already cloned non-recursively, you can initialize submodules afterwards by running 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 gradle/gradle#6074).

For simplicity of the following usage examples, the above ORT invocations are unified to just ort --help.

Running the tools

First, make sure that the locale of your system is set to en_US.UTF-8 as using other locales might lead to issues with parsing the output of some external tools.

Then, let ORT check whether all required external tools are available by running

ort requirements

and install any missing tools or add compatible versions as indicated.

Finally, ORT tools like the analyzer can be run like

ort --info analyze -f JSON -i /project -o /project/ort/analyzer

Just the like top-level ort command, the subcommands for all tools provide a --help option for detailed usage help. Use it like ort analyze --help.

Please see Getting Started for an introduction to the individual tools.

Running on CI

A basic ORT pipeline (using the analyzer, scanner and reporter) can easily be run on Jenkins CI by using the Jenkinsfile in a (declarative) pipeline job. Please see the Jenkinsfile itself for documentation of the required Jenkins plugins. The job accepts various parameters that are translated to ORT command line arguments. Additionally, one can trigger a downstream job which e.g. further processes scan results. Note that it is the downstream job's responsibility to copy any artifacts it needs from the upstream job.

Configuration

Environment variables

ORT supports several environment variables that influence its behavior:

Configuration files

ORT looks for its configuration files in the directory pointed to by the ORT_CONFIG_DIR environment variable. If this variable is not set, it defaults to the config directory below the directory pointed to by the ORT_DATA_DIR environment variable, which in turn defaults to the .ort directory below the current user's home directory.

The following provides an overview of the various configuration files that can be used to customize ORT behavior:

ORT configuration file

The main configuration file for the operation of ORT. This configuration is maintained by an administrator who manages the ORT instance. In contrast to the configuration files in the following, this file rarely changes once ORT is operational.

The reference configuration file gives a good impression about the content of the main ORT configuration file. It consists of sections related to different subcomponents of ORT. The meaning of these sections and the properties they can contain is described together with the corresponding subcomponents.

While the file is rather static, there are means to override configuration options for a specific run of ORT or to customize the configuration to a specific environment. The following options are supported, in order of precedence:

• Properties can be defined via environment variables by using the full property path as the variable name. For instance, one can override the Postgres schema by setting ort.scanner.storages.postgres.connection.schema=test_schema. The variable's name is case-sensitive. Some programs like Bash do not support dots in variable names. For this case, the dots can be replaced by double underscores, i.e., the above example is turned into ort__scanner__storages__postgres__connection__schema=test_schema.

• In addition to that, one can override the values of properties on the command line using the -P option. The option expects a key-value pair. Again, the key must define the full path to the property to be overridden, e.g. -P ort.scanner.storages.postgres.connection.schema=test_schema. The -P option can be repeated on the command line to override multiple properties.

• Properties in the configuration file can reference environment variables using the syntax ${VAR}. This is especially useful to reference dynamic or sensitive data. As an example, the credentials for the Postgres database used as scan results storage could be defined in the POSTGRES_USERNAME and POSTGRES_PASSWORD environment variables. The configuration file can then reference these values as follows:

  postgres:
    connection:
      url: "jdbc:postgresql://your-postgresql-server:5444/your-database"
      username: ${POSTGRES_USERNAME}
      password: ${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}

To print the active configuration use:

ort config --show-active

Copyright garbage file

A list of copyright statements that are considered garbage, for example statements that were incorrectly classified as copyrights by the scanner.

Curations file

A file to correct invalid or missing package metadata, and to set the concluded license for packages.

Custom license texts dir

A directory that contains license texts which are not provided by ORT.

How to fix text provider script

A Kotlin script that enables the injection of how-to-fix texts in Markdown format for ORT issues into the reports.

License classifications file

A file that contains user-defined categorization of licenses.

Resolution file

Configurations to resolve any issues or rule violations by providing a mandatory reason, and an optional comment to justify the resolution on a global scale.

Repository configuration file

A configuration file, usually stored in the project's repository, for license finding curations, exclusions, and issues or rule violations resolutions in the context of the repository.

Package configuration file / directory

A single file or a directory with multiple files containing configurations to set provenance-specific path excludes and license finding curations for dependency packages to address issues found within a scan result. helper-cli's package-config create command can be used to populate a directory with template package configuration files.

Policy rules file

The file containing any policy rule implementations to be used with the evaluator.

Protecting environment variables

In order to do its analysis, ORT invokes a number of external tools, such as package managers or scanners. Especially when interacting with package managers to obtain the dependencies of the analyzed project, this can lead to the execution of code in build scripts from potentially unknown sources. A possible risk in this constellation is that untrusted code could read sensitive information from environment variables used for the ORT configuration, such as database connection strings or service credentials. This is because the environment variables of a process are by default propagated to the child processes spawned by it.

To reduce this risk, ORT filters out certain environment variables when it runs external tools in child processes. This filter mechanism can be configured via the following properties in the ORT configuration file:

This mechanism offers a certain level of security without enforcing an excessive amount of configuration, which would be needed for instance to define an explicit allow list. With the two configuration properties even corner cases can be defined:

• In order to disable filtering of environment variables completely, set the deniedProcessEnvironmentVariablesSubstrings property to a single string that is certainly not contained in any environment variable, such as "This is for sure not contained in a variable name".
• To prevent that any environment variable is passed to a child process, substrings can be configured in deniedProcessEnvironmentVariablesSubstrings that match all variables, for instance one string for each letter of the alphabet.

Details on the tools

The analyzer is a Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tool that determines the dependencies of software projects inside the specified input directory (-i). It does so by querying the detected package managers; no modifications to your existing project source code, like applying build system plugins, are necessary for that to work. The tree of transitive dependencies per project is written out as part of an OrtResult in YAML (or JSON, see -f) format to a file named analyzer-result.yml in the specified output directory (-o). The output file exactly documents the status quo of all package-related metadata. It can be further processed or manually edited before passing it to one of the other tools.

Currently, the following package managers (grouped by the programming language they are most commonly used with) are supported:

• C / C++
  • Conan
  • Also see: SPDX documents
• Dart / Flutter
  • Pub
• Go
  • dep
  • Glide
  • Godep
  • GoMod
• Haskell
  • Stack
• Java
  • Gradle
  • Maven (limitations: default profile only)
• JavaScript / Node.js
  • Bower
  • NPM (limitations: no peer dependencies)
  • PNPM (limitations: no peer dependencies)
  • Yarn 1
  • Yarn 2+
• .NET
  • DotNet (limitations: no floating versions / ranges, no target framework)
  • NuGet (limitations: no floating versions / ranges, no target framework)
• Objective-C / Swift
  • Carthage (limitation: no cartfile.private)
  • CocoaPods (limitations: no custom source repositories)
• PHP
  • Composer
• Python
  • PIP
  • Pipenv
  • Poetry
• Ruby
  • Bundler (limitations: restricted to the version available on the host)
• Rust
  • Cargo
• Scala
  • SBT
• Unmanaged
  • This is a special "package manager" that manages all files that cannot be associated to any of the other package managers.

If another package manager that is not part of the list above is used (or no package manager at all), the generic fallback to SPDX documents can be leveraged to describe projects or packages.

Taking an ORT result file with an analyzer result as the input (-i), the downloader retrieves the source code of all contained packages to the specified output directory (-o). The downloader takes care of things like normalizing URLs and using the appropriate VCS tool to check out source code from version control.

Currently, the following Version Control Systems (VCS) are supported:

• Git
• Git-Repo
• Mercurial
• Subversion

This tool wraps underlying license / copyright scanners with a common API so all supported scanners can be used in the same way to easily run them and compare their results. If passed an ORT result file with an analyzer result (-i), the scanner will automatically download the sources of the dependencies via the downloader and scan them afterwards.

We recommend to use ORT with one of the following scanners as their integration has been thoroughly tested (in alphabetical order):

• FossID
• ScanCode

Additionally, the following reference implementations exist (in alphabetical order):

• Askalono
• lc
• Licensee
• SCANOSS

For a comparison of some of these, see this Bachelor Thesis.

Storage Backends

In order to not download or scan any previously scanned sources again, or to reuse scan results generated via other services, the scanner can be configured to use so-called storage backends. Before processing a package, it checks whether compatible scan results are already available in one of the storages declared; if this is the case, they are fetched and reused. Otherwise, the package's source code is downloaded and scanned. Afterwards, the new scan results can be put into a storage for later reuse.

This reuse of scan results can actually happen on a per-repository (type: "PROVENANCE_BASED") or per-package (type: "PACKAGE_BASED") basis. For all storages based on FileBasedStorage or PostgresStorage, the scanner wrapper groups packages by their provenance before scanning. This ensures that a certain revision of a VCS repository is only scanned once, and the results are shared for all packages that are provided by this repository. In the case of repositories that provide a lot of packages, this can bring a significant performance improvement.

It is possible to configure multiple storages to read scan results from or to write scan results to. For reading, the declaration order in the configuration is important, as the scanner queries the storages in this order and uses the first matching result. This allows a fine-grained control over the sources, from which existing scan results are loaded. For instance, you can specify that the scanner checks first whether results for a specific package are available in a local storage on the file system. If this is not the case, it can look up the package in a Postgres database. If this does not yield any results either, a service like ClearlyDefined can be queried. Only if all of these steps fail, the scanner has to actually process the package.

When storing a newly generated scan result the scanner invokes all the storages declared as writers. The storage operation is considered successful if all writer storages could successfully persist the scan result.

The configuration of storage backends is located in the ORT configuration file. (For the general structure of this file and the set of options available refer to the reference configuration.) The file has a section named storages that lists all the storage backends and assigns them a name. Each storage backend is of a specific type and needs to be configured with type-specific properties. The different types of storage backends supported by ORT are described below.

After the declaration of the storage backends, the configuration file has to specify which ones of them the scanner should use for looking up existing scan results or to store new results. This is done in two list properties named storageReaders and storageWriters. The lists reference the names of the storage backends declared in the storages section. The scanner invokes the storage backends in the order they appear in the lists; so for readers, this defines a priority for look-up operations. Each storage backend can act as a reader; however, some types do not support updates and thus cannot serve as writers. If a storage backend is referenced both as reader and writer, the scanner creates only a single instance of this storage class.

The following subsections describe the different storage backend implementations supported by ORT. Note that the name of a storage entry (like fileBasedStorage) can be freely chosen. That name is then used to refer to the storage from the storageReaders and storageWriters sections.

Local File Storage

By default, the scanner stores scan results on the local file system in the current user's home directory (i.e. ~/.ort/scanner/scan-results) for later reuse. Settings like the storage directory and the compression flag can be customized in the ORT configuration file (-c) with a respective storage configuration:

ort:
  scanner:
    storages:
      fileBasedStorage:
        backend:
          localFileStorage:
            directory: "/tmp/ort/scan-results"
            compression: false

    storageReaders: ["fileBasedStorage"]
    storageWriters: ["fileBasedStorage"]

HTTP Storage

Any HTTP file server can be used to store scan results. Custom headers can be configured to provide authentication credentials. For example, to use Artifactory to store scan results, use the following configuration:

ort:
  scanner:
    storages:
      artifactoryStorage:
        backend:
          httpFileStorage:
            url: "https://artifactory.domain.com/artifactory/repository/scan-results"
            headers:
              X-JFrog-Art-Api: "api-token"

    storageReaders: ["artifactoryStorage"]
    storageWriters: ["artifactoryStorage"]

PostgreSQL Storage

To use PostgreSQL for storing scan results you need at least version 9.4, create a database with the client_encoding set to UTF8, and a configuration like the following:

ort:
  scanner:
    storages:
      postgresStorage:
        connection:
          url: "jdbc:postgresql://example.com:5444/database"
          schema: "public"
          username: "username"
          password: "password"
          sslmode: "verify-full"

    storageReaders: ["postgresStorage"]
    storageWriters: ["postgresStorage"]

The database needs to exist. If the schema is set to something else than the default of public, it needs to exist and be accessible by the configured username.

The scanner will itself create a table called scan_results and store the data in a jsonb column.

If you do not want to use SSL set the sslmode to disable, other possible values are explained in the documentation. For other supported configuration options see ScanStorageConfiguration.kt.

ClearlyDefined Storage

ClearlyDefined is a service offering curated metadata for Open Source components. This includes scan results that can be used by ORT's scanner tool (if they have been generated by a compatible scanner version with a suitable configuration). This storage backend queries the ClearlyDefined service for scan results of the packages to be processed. It is read-only; so it will not upload any new scan results to ClearlyDefined. In the configuration the URL of the ClearlyDefined service needs to be set:

ort:
  scanner:
    storages:
      clearlyDefined:
        serverUrl: "https://api.clearlydefined.io"

    storageReaders: ["clearlyDefined"]

The advisor retrieves security advisories from configured services. It requires the analyzer result as an input. For all the packages identified by the analyzer, it queries the services configured for known security vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities returned by these services are then stored in the output result file together with additional information like the source of the data and a severity (if available).

Multiple providers for security advisories are available. The providers require specific configuration in the ORT configuration file, which needs to be placed in the advisor section. When executing the advisor the providers to enable are selected with the --advisors option (or its short alias -a); here a comma-separated list with provider IDs is expected. The following sections describe the providers supported by the advisor:

NexusIQ

A security data provider that queries Nexus IQ Server. In the configuration, the URL where Nexus IQ Server is running and the credentials to authenticate need to be provided:

ort:
  advisor:
    nexusIq:
      serverUrl: "https://nexusiq.ossreviewtoolkit.org"
      username: myUser
      password: myPassword

To enable this provider, pass -a NexusIQ on the command line.

OSS Index

This vulnerability provider does not require any further configuration as it uses the public service at https://ossindex.sonatype.org/. Before using this provider, please ensure to comply with its Terms of Service.

To enable this provider, pass -a OssIndex on the command line.

VulnerableCode

This provider obtains information about security vulnerabilities from a VulnerableCode instance. The configuration is limited to the server URL, as authentication is not required:

ort:
  advisor:
    vulnerableCode:
      serverUrl: "http://localhost:8000"

To enable this provider, pass -a VulnerableCode on the command line.

OSV

This provider obtains information about security vulnerabilities from Google OSV, a distributed vulnerability database for Open Source. The database aggregates data from different sources for various ecosystems. The configuration is optional and limited to overriding the server URL.

ort:
  advisor:
    osv:
      serverUrl: "https://api-staging.osv.dev"

To enable this provider, pass -a OSV on the command line.

The evaluator is used to perform custom license policy checks on scan results. The rules to check against are implemented as Kotlin scripts with a dedicated DSL. See example.rules.kts for an example rules script.

The reporter generates a wide variety of documents in different formats from ORT result files. Currently, the following formats are supported (reporter names are case-insensitive):

• AsciiDoc Template (-f AsciiDocTemplate)
  • Content customizable with Apache Freemarker templates and AsciiDoc
  • PDF style customizable with Asciidoctor PDF themes
  • Supports multiple AsciiDoc backends:
    • PDF (-f PdfTemplate)
    • HTML (-f HtmlTemplate)
    • DocBook (-f DocBookTemplate)
    • Man page (-f ManPageTemplate)
• ctrlX AUTOMATION platform FOSS information (-f CtrlXAutomation)
• CycloneDX BOM (-f CycloneDx)
• FossID report download (HTML, SPDX, and Excel types)
• GitLabLicenseModel (-f GitLabLicenseModel)
  • There is a tutorial video by @xlgmokha
• NOTICE file in two variants
  • List license texts and copyrights by package (-f PlainTextTemplate)
  • Summarize all license texts and copyrights (-f PlainTextTemplate -O PlainTextTemplate=template.id=NOTICE_SUMMARY)
  • Customizable with Apache Freemarker templates
• Opossum input that can be visualized and edited in the OpossumUI (-f Opossum)
• SPDX Document, version 2.2 (-f SpdxDocument)
• Static HTML (-f StaticHtml)
• Web App (-f WebApp)
  • Also see the EvaluatedModelReporter (-f EvaluatedModel) which is the JSON / YAML format used by the Web App report that is also suitable for custom post-processing.

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 (-Xmx=8g) and to use a CPU with at least 4 cores.

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.

Development

ORT is written in Kotlin and uses Gradle as the build system, with Kotlin script instead of Groovy as the DSL. Please ensure to have Gradle's incubating configuration on demand feature disabled as it is currently incompatible with ORT.

When developing on the command line, use the committed Gradle wrapper to bootstrap Gradle in the configured version and execute any given tasks. The most important tasks for this project are:

All contributions need to pass the detekt, test and funTest checks before they can be merged.

For IDE development we recommend the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition which can directly import the Gradle build files. After cloning the project's source code recursively, simply run IDEA and use the following steps to import the project.

1. From the Welcome dialog: Select Open.

   From a running IDEA instance: Select File > New > Project from Existing Sources...

2. Browse to ORT's source code directory and select either the build.gradle.kts or the settings.gradle.kts file.

3. In the Open Project dialog select Open as Project.

Debugging

To set up a basic run configuration for debugging, navigate to OrtMain.kt in the cli module and look for the fun main(args: Array<String>) function. In the gutter next to it, a green "Play" icon should be displayed. Click on it and select Run 'OrtMainKt' to run the entry point, which implicitly creates a run configuration. Double-check that running ORT without any arguments will simply show the command line help in IDEA's Run tool window. Finally, edit the created run configuration to your needs, e.g. by adding an argument and options to run a specific ORT sub-command.

Testing

ORT uses Kotest as the test framework. For running tests and individual test cases from the IDE, the Kotest plugin needs to be installed. Afterwards, tests can be run via the green "Play" icon from the gutter as described above.

When running functional tests (for package managers) from the command line, ORT supports the special value "unified" for Kotest's kotest.assertions.multi-line-diff system property. When set like

./gradlew -Dkotest.assertions.multi-line-diff=unified -p plugins/package-managers funTest

any failing tests will show the deviation from the expected result in a unified diff format that is compatible with git apply. If the actual result should be taken as the new expected result, simply copy the diff from the console to the clipboard and run

• wl-paste | col -bx | git apply (Linux with Wayland)
• xsel -b | col -bx | git apply (Linux with X)

to apply the diff to the local Git working tree (this does not create a commit yet). After reviewing the changes, create a commit to accept the new expected result.

Related Tools

ORT Config Repository

A repository with exemplary ORT configuration files.

ORT Workbench

The ORT Workbench is an ORT result file viewer developed by the ORT core team. It can be used as an alternative to creating a report to review the ORT output.

ORT GitHub Action

A GitHub Action to run ORT for your GitHub repositories.

ORT GitLab Pipeline

A GitLab Pipeline to run ORT for your GitLab repositories.

ORTHW

A bash script that helps to simplify and speed up common tasks performed when processing ORT results.

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.