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A permalink for your MIT License

I always forget to add an MIT-license.txt file to my projects, so I wanted to link to a single resource that would always be up to date and would always have my details online.

But why keep this to myself, there's two ways to create your own MIT license page:

  1. Make a request to the API (details below)
  2. Fork this project and send a pull request

Now I can always include http://rem.mit-license.org in all my projects which links rem (the cname) against my copyright holder name Remy Sharp - all stored in the users directory.

Requesting your own MIT license page

You can fork this project, send me a pull request and wait for me to pull (which I'll do as quickly as possible) or if the user is still available you can do it yourself from the command line:

curl -d'{ "copyright": "Remy Sharp" }' http://rem.mit-license.org

If the rem user isn't taken already, then this will create the new user file on the fly and the url will be immediately available.

You can send a full JSON file to the API, not just the copyright, so this works too:

curl -d'{ "copyright": "Remy Sharp", "url": "http://remysharp.com", "email": "[email protected]", "format": "txt" }' http://rem.mit-license.org

If there's any problems in the automated creation, send me a pull request and it'll go live soon after.

Equally if you need to update the user file to include more details that you didn't initially include (extra fields in the next section) you will need to send a pull request on that user.json file via GitHub.

The user.json file

The users directory contains a list of files, each representing a host on mit-license.org. The minimum requirement for the JSON is that is contains a copyright field - everything else is optional. Remember to ensure the user.json file is valid JSON.

Available fields:

  • copyright (required)
  • url
  • email
  • format
  • gravatar
  • version
  • theme

copyright

Create a new file and give it the name of the CNAME you want (in my case it's rem.json). This file contains a JSON object containing at least a copyright property:

{
  "copyright": "Remy Sharp, http://remysharp.com"
}

Means I can now link to: http://rem.mit-license.org and it will show my license name (note that the date will always show the current year).

url

In addition to the copyright property, if you want to make a link from the copyright text, you can include a url property:

{
  "copyright": "Remy Sharp, http://remysharp.com",
  "url": "http://remysharp.com"
}

email

You can also include a link to your email which is displayed after the copyright notice using the email property (note the mailto: is automatically added):

{
  "copyright": "Remy Sharp, http://remysharp.com",
  "url": "http://remysharp.com",
  "email": "[email protected]"
}

format

And if you want your license to appear as plain text, just add the format property (currently only txt and html are supported):

{
  "copyright": "Remy Sharp, http://remysharp.com",
  "url": "http://remysharp.com",
  "format": "txt"
}

gravatar

And if you want to show your gravatar, just add the gravatar boolean property:

{
  "copyright": "Remy Sharp, http://remysharp.com",
  "url": "http://remysharp.com",
  "email": "[email protected]",
  "gravatar": true
}

Note that the gravatar requires the email property. You also need to check the compatibility of the chosen theme. Currently, only the default theme supports Gravatar.

License version targeting

License version targeting allows you to link your MIT license to a specific revision in this project - therefore fixing it permanently to a specific license text.

Though I don't expect the license text to change ever, this is just some extra assurance for you.

Targeting requires the sha from the license commit. This can be specified on the URL (in your permalink) or in the JSON file.

For example: http://rem.mit-license.org/a526bf7ad1 (make sure to view-source) shows an older version of the LICENSE.html file (compared to the latest version

  • the older version didn't have the new themes).

This can also be targeted in my JSON file:

{
  "copyright": "Remy Sharp, http://remysharp.com",
  "url": "http://remysharp.com",
  "version": "a526rbf7"
}

Note that if no version is supplied, the latest copy of the LICENSE.html will be displayed with your information included.

Themes

If you've got an eye for design (or like me: not): you can contribute a theme by adding a CSS file to the themes directory. The default theme is simple and clean, but you can add your own as you like.

To use a theme, add the theme property to your user.json file, for example:

{
  "copyright": "Remy Sharp, http://remysharp.com",
  "url": "http://remysharp.com",
  "theme": "flesch"
}

Current available themes:

Formats & URLs

The following types of requests can be made to this project:

The url also supports including a start year:

Ways to contribute

Aside from code contributions that make the project better, there are a few other specific ways that you can contribute to this project.

Development contributions from:

1. Donate domain years

I host the domain with namecheap.com and yearly renewal is $9.69 per year. If you want to contribute a year, send me a message and I'll add the years on.

Of course I'll do my best to continue running the domain and hosting, but this is your chance to contribute to the community project.

Domain contributions:

Please note that the whois says 2021 as you can only have 10 active registered years with ICCAN - but the domain is set to auto-renew, so it's all good :)

2. Hosting

Currently the project is hosted on my own server, and I don't expect my server to go away any time soon, but if a lovely hosting company, like Joyent or Media Temple or someone equally as lovely wants to step in and contribute a simple server to host from - then we'll credit you appropriately and you'll get lots of kudos from the web community for being lovely.

3. A lick of paint

I'm a developer, I seem only capable of grey! If you're a designer and want to contribute a decent lick of paint on the project that would be super. Just create a new theme and send me a pull request.

License

And of course:

MIT: http://rem.mit-license.org