Acknowledgements

✨ Properly credit deps and assets in your projects in a pretty way.

About

Acknowledgments is a CLI tool that generates a JSON file with a list of all the local dependencies from package.json, as well as ones you add yourself, with exports to many file types (CSV, TOML, HTML, YAML and Markdown).

Installation

npm install --global acknowledgements
# OR
yarn global add acknowledgements
# OR
pnpm add --global acknowledgements

Installing locally will also work.

Usage

# From the root of the project
ack

# With a specified folder
ack packages/my-package # or yarn ack

# With Acknowledgements installed locally
npx ack # or yarn ack

This command by default only generates a JSON file with your installed dependencies. (Example)

You can also export to CSV, HTML, Markdown, TOML or YAML using the --formats flag using an array of these file types. Example:

ack --formats csv html md toml yaml # or -F instead of formats

Acknowledgements skips devDependencies by default. To include them, use the --include-dev flag.

ack --include-dev # or -D

You can also recursively read the dependencies of your project's dependencies. For that, use the --recursive flag.

ack --recursive # or -R

Manually adding credits

If you're working on a project where you need to credit external projects that are not in your package.json (e.g. a game where you want to credit a set of textures, music pieces, etc.), Acknowledgements provides a add command.

ack add

This will prompt you to choose a name, URL and author name.

Note: Adding credits manually will keep them forever in your credits.json, unless you remove them. Manual credits have a "type" property of "MANUAL_CREDIT".

Advanced usage

This command recursively reads dependencies, includes all developer deps and exports to JSON and Markdown.

ack -R -D -F md # Short hand for --recursive --include-dev --formats md

To automatically run Acknowledgements after adding a dependency, add it to a postinstall script in your package.json like so:

{
  {
    "script": {
      //...
      "postinstall": "ack" // replace "ack" with whatever script you want
    }
  }
}

Note that this will not work after uninstalling a dependency, as mentioned in the npm documentation

Roadmap

[x] Have an actual README
[x] Command to manually add new stuff to credit
[ ] Option to ignore @types/ devDependencies in credits
[ ] Customize Markdown header
[ ] Support monorepo merging to one file
[x] Support more output types
[ ] Support multiple files
[ ] Support for non-Node projects
[x] Recursively find dependencies' dependencies