The AboutCode Toolkit provides a set of utilities to:

• Track provenance (origin and license) metadata for your software components inside your Development Codebase for cases where you do not have a package manager to manage that data,
• Generate Attribution Notices, and
• Generate Software Inventory or BOM reports.

The AboutCode format for tracking provenance metadata is an ABOUT file. An ABOUT file is a small YAML-formatted text file with field/value pairs. Each ABOUT file documents the origin and license for one software component along with a wide range of optional fields which are documented in the ABOUT specification version 3.1.4 at: https://github.com/nexB/aboutcode-toolkit/blob/develop/SPECIFICATION.rst. You can see examples of ABOUT files and their use in any of our projects – ScanCode Toolkit in particular has many good examples.

You can use AboutCode Toolkit to generate compliance documents directly from ABOUT files in your codebase, or from software inventory data stored in a CSV file.