I.M Blogging

reuse is widely packaged¹ so its likely already present in your distros repo. Making installation through your preferred package manager simple.

The first and most important command is reuse annotate, which creates the copyright notice, and references to the licences. It needs three arguments, the first being the notice information (-c "YOUR_NAME <YOUR_EMAIL@example.com>"), as well as the licence to use (-l "SPDX_LICENSE_IDENTIFIER"), along with files to be annotated. Putting it all together will give you this.

reuse annotate -c "YOUR_NAME <YOUR_EMAIL@example.com>" -l "SPDX_LICENSE_IDENTIFIER" YOUR_FILE

This will add a header compliant with the reuse standard to the file in question. it will look something like below, though it can change depending on the specific notice style² and file type.

# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: YOUR_NAME <YOUR_EMAIL@example.com> 
#
# SPDX-License-Identifier: SPDX_LICENSE_IDENTIFIER

Now this command is quite unwieldy, which is why I would recommend you to create aliases or abbreviations in your shell to infill the data.

While this will cover most of your uses, sometimes you'll need to annotate a binary file or one that you shouldn't edit. In these situations you should pass --force-dot-license which will create a seprate file with the notice. Other times reuse wont recognize a file type, in which case you can use a dot licence like before or as a fallback (--fallback-dot-license). Forcing a style with --style=STYLE³ is useful when you know the correct encoding for a particular file.

After you have notices for all the files, reuse download --all will place the needed licenses into a LICENSES folder at the root of the repo.

reuse lint is a simple command that will check the repo for files that have no notices, and other missing information. Giving a few recommendations on how to fix the issues and insure compliance.