This article covers how to begin tracking projects with the Tidelift Subscription from the web application and from Tidelift CLI. You will learn how to create a new project, get project API keys, get a bill of materials, and check alignment of that project with its catalog of approved open source.
If this is your first time getting a bill of materials, we recommend using the Tidelift web app. For long-term use, Tidelift CLI is strongly recommended. Some features and ecosystems are only supported through Tidelift CLI.
Getting a new bill of materials for a new project
You will want to track each repository or application that contains open source as a project within Tidelift.
From the Tidelift web app | From Tidelift CLI |
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Getting an updated bill of materials for an existing project
1. Generating a Project Key (for use in CLI or CI)
If you have already created a project but did not use tidelift init
, you can later upload a bill of materials (tidelift alignment save
), but you will need to generate a project-specific API key. These keys are scoped to a project and necessary to use (as opposed to your User Key) because they are often integrated into a CI set-up.
From the Tidelift web app | From Tidelift CLI |
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2. Upload new package files to get a bill of materials and check alignment
For each project, you can upload package files to get a bill of materials that lists all of the open source packages used. We automatically calculate the alignment of this bill of materials with the catalog. 100% alignment indicates that a project is only using open source that is approved for use in the catalog.
Using Tidelift CLI is strongly recommended for this step. Some features and ecosystems are only supported through Tidelift CLI.
From the Tidelift web app | From Tidelift CLI (recommended) |
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What next?
At this point, you should have a bill of materials for a project and know whether or not it's in alignment with the catalog. Depending on your goals, you may choose to do any number of things:
- If you are trying to get more information about the project's bill of materials, you can select Bill of materials in the left-hand navigation to see and export a complete bill of materials and license data for this project.
- If you want to start creating a catalog of approved open source, you can do this by selecting Add Packages from the Tidelift web application.