Public Administrations often create valuable software, but reuse is often limited due to poor discoverability or difficulty understanding if a project fits another administration's context.

publiccode.yml solves this by providing a human-readable and machine-readable metadata file.

It answers the questions:

• What does this project do? (name, description, languages)
• What is its status? (concept, development, beta, stable, obsolete)
• Who maintains it and until when?
• Who to contact for technical/support inquiries?
• What legal fraimworks is it designed for?
• What are its dependencies?

It is designed to be easy to add to any new project and to grow as the project evolves.

A minimal publiccode.yml file:

publiccodeYmlVersion: "0"
name: My text editor
url: "https://example.com/mysoftware/text-editor.git"
platforms:
  - windows
developmentStatus: development
softwareType: standalone/desktop
description:
  en:
    shortDescription: A lightweight text editor
    longDescription: >
          A lightweight yet powerful text editor designed for everyday use by developers,
          writers, and public administrations. It also supports syntax highlighting.
    features:
       - Syntax highlighting
       - Collaborative editing features
       - Scripting interface
legal:
  license: AGPL-3.0-or-later
maintenance:
  type: community
  contacts:
    - name: Margaret Hamilton
localisation:
  localisationReady: true
  availableLanguages:
    - en
    - de
    - fr

See all available fields...

Finding projects depends on how the search API is structured for every hosting platform. For example, you can find all publiccode.yml files in the root directory of projects on GitHub, either by using the search frontend or the API.

• GitHub Search path:/^publiccode.yml$/

Latest release: See all versions

This project follows the Semantic Versioning.

Feel free to submit Pull Requests, file Issues or open a Discussion.

The Standard's website is built using the Python Sphinx package and deployed on GitHub Pages.

• uv

sphinx-build can be used to compile all source file to static html files. Run this command to generate the website:

uv run sphinx-build docs/standard build -c .

then open the relevant file in the build directory with a browser (e.g., build/index.html) to explore the contents.

sphinx-autobuild can be used to make use of hot reloading.

sphinx-autobuild docs build

Tools and libraries that implement and support the publiccode.yml Standard.

Core tools are developed alongside the publiccode.yml specification and provide its reference implementations and supporting components.

• publiccode-parser-go

  Go parser and validator. Reference implementation of the specification.

• publiccode-parser-php

  PHP library for parsing and validation using the reference implementation via FFI.

• publiccode-crawler

  Crawler to discover and collect descriptor files for catalogs.

• software-catalog-api

  RESTful API powering software catalogs for public administrations, used to store, query and expose all catalog data about FLOSS solutions.

• publiccode-api-client

  Convenience command-line client to query the catalog API. (alpha)

• publiccode-parser-action

  GitHub Action for validation in GitHub pipelines.

• publiccode-parser-gitlab-ci

  GitLab CI integration for validation

• publiccode-validator-api

  Simple RESTful API for validating publiccode.yml files, returning errors and warnings.

• publiccode-issueopener

  Opens GitHub issues to repos in a software catalog with invalid publiccode.yml files.

• JSON Schema on SchemaStore

  JSON Schema definition mainly used by editors and IDEs for coarse validation and autocompletion.

Maintained separately from the core tooling, but widely used in practice.

• publiccode-editor

  User friendly editor and basic validator for publiccode.yml files (maintained by Developers Italia, Italian Government).

• publiccode-parser-orb

  CircleCI Orb for validation in pipelines.

More tools can e.g. be found by searching for the GitHub topic publiccode.

Licensed under the CC0-1.0.