'What should I put in the license field of package.json if my code is only for use by the company I work for?

NPM 2.11.3

I'm building a library in Node. This library is only for use by the company I am currently working for. I think this means that the license is "None". But when I npm init it wants me to use an SPDX License. "None" or "Unlicensed" are not valid options.

npm WARN package.json [email protected] license should be a valid SPDX license expression

There is some discussion around this on the NPM GitHub issue tracker but I can't find anything that definitively answers this. Perhaps NPM doesn't support this concept, but that seems odd.

What should I put for this field in this case? I'd like to get rid of the npm warnings related to this.

While the docs say that UNLICENSED is valid, it still gives a warning:

$ cat package.json | grep licen
  "license": "UNLICENSED",

$ npm install 
npm WARN package.json [email protected] license should be a valid SPDX license expression
node.jspackage.json


Solution 1:[1]

Use UNLICENSED per the npm docs:

Finally, if you do not wish to grant others the right to use a private or unpublished package under any terms:

{
  "license": "UNLICENSED"
}

This is not to be confused with the license that was confusingly called "The Unlicense".

Solution 2:[2]

at the time of writing UNLICENSED (see the code sample in the question) was not an option please see jcollum's answer

Adding private to package.json will help:

"private": true

Solution 3:[3]

On the second column of the table found on this link, https://spdx.org/licenses/, you can see all the different SPDX format to used in your package.json.

The name of the column is Identifier just in case. Thanks and hope it helps.

Solution 4:[4]

For me whatever license I put in the code did not work. But then I figured out, that there is a invalid package.json in the parent directory. After removing it, this solved all the issues.

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 mikemaccana
Solution 2 jcollum
Solution 3
Solution 4 bukso

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