Ask Claude to Check Your Dependency Licenses for Compliance Issues
License compliance is easy to ignore until legal asks about it. Claude Code can audit your entire dependency tree and flag problems before they become expensive.
Read my package-lock.json (or composer.lock, Cargo.lock, etc.) and check
the license of every dependency. Flag any that are GPL, AGPL, or have
restrictions incompatible with an MIT-licensed project.
Claude reads the lockfile, checks each package's license field, and produces a clear report:
# Example output
✓ 142 packages — MIT, Apache-2.0, ISC, BSD (compatible)
⚠ 3 packages — unknown or missing license:
- obscure-utils@2.1.0 (no license field)
- legacy-parser@1.0.3 (WTFPL — check if acceptable)
❌ 1 package — potentially incompatible:
- pdf-generator@3.2.1 (GPL-3.0 — copyleft, may require your code to be GPL)
Target specific compliance concerns:
# Check for copyleft
Find any dependencies with GPL, LGPL, AGPL, or EUPL licenses.
We're building a commercial SaaS product and need to avoid copyleft.
# Find missing licenses
List every dependency that doesn't have a license field
in its package.json. These are the riskiest for compliance.
# Check transitive dependencies
Don't just check direct dependencies — check the entire tree.
A GPL package three levels deep still applies.
# Compare against a policy
Here's our approved license list: MIT, Apache-2.0, ISC, BSD-2-Clause,
BSD-3-Clause. Flag anything not on this list.
For ongoing compliance, add a check to your CLAUDE.md:
# In CLAUDE.md
When adding new dependencies, always check the package's license
before installing. We only accept MIT, Apache-2.0, ISC, and BSD licenses.
This makes Claude check license compatibility every time it suggests adding a new package, not just during audits.
A single GPL dependency in a commercial codebase can derail a deal — let Claude check the licenses before legal has to.
via Claude Code
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Set up Claude Code as an automated reviewer in your CI pipeline — on every pull request, it reads the diff, checks for bugs, security issues, missing tests, and convention violations, then posts its findings as a PR comment. Your human reviewers get a head start because the obvious issues are already flagged before they look.
Before deploying, tell Claude to read your project — migrations, environment variables, queue workers, scheduled tasks, caching, third-party integrations — and generate a deployment checklist that's specific to your app. Not a generic "did you run migrations?" list, but one that knows YOUR infrastructure and catches the things YOUR deploy can break.
Instead of writing a README from memory or copying a template, tell Claude to read your project and generate one that's actually accurate — real setup instructions from your config, real architecture from your directory structure, real API examples from your routes, and real prerequisites from your dependency files.