The AboutCode Toolkit provides a set of utilities to:

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

The core data for AboutCode Toolkit are ABOUT files in your codebase. An ABOUT file is a small YAML-formatted text file with field/value pairs. Each ABOUT file documents 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.