How to export dependency licenses information to csv? - flutter

Question

Having an application with about 30 dependencies, we report about the licenses in the app via the default showLicensePage.
How can we export this list to a CSV format (including transitive dependencies)? I am looking for something like this:
package name,transitive (direct/transitive),license,link
some_package,direct,MIT,https://github.com/someone/some_package
...

Answer 1

The LicenseFinder has support for flutter since version 7.0.0 and supports many output formats including csv. The good thing over e.g. flutter_oss_licenses is that it also provides the license name (not only the license text) and also has many other features (e.g. allowing a set of licenses, CI-support, other languages/package-managers support etc.), it is actively maintained by pivotal and is itself MIT licensed.
For example, one can use the docker version to run it (see README - for more information how to run the tool).
Then you can get a csv report for your flutter project with a command like this:
cd some_flutter_project
docker run -v $PWD:/scan -it licensefinder/license_finder:7.0.1 /bin/bash -lc "cd /scan && PUB_CACHE=~/.pub license_finder report --format=csv -p"
This command will mount the current working directory to the docker container and analyze it. The -p option runs flutter pub get in the docker container to setup the dependency cache that is then analyzed.
Note that the command will print the result to standard out, but you can, for example, pipe it to a file (command from above) > out.csv.