Configuration

modelaudit has no config file. Everything is set by command-line flags and a few environment variables. This page is built from __main__.py and detect.py.

usage: modelaudit [-h] [--ship {app,private,service}] [--offline] [--json]
                  [--all] [--depth DEPTH]
                  [path]

Options

path

The directory to audit. Optional, defaults to . (the current directory). ~ is expanded.

If it is not a directory, the tool prints modelaudit: error: not a directory: PATH and exits with code 2.

If path is itself a git repository it is reported as a code finding like any other checkout.

--ship {app,service,private}

How the thing you build reaches other people. Default: service.

Value	Description printed by the tool
app	You distribute a binary, app bundle, or installer to users.
service	Users reach it over a network. A site, an API, a phone app talking to your server.
private	Only you and your team run it. Nothing leaves the building.

The ship mode changes the severity of GPL, AGPL and weak copyleft licenses. It does not change non-commercial (always blocker), vendor (always review) or permissive (always attribution) licenses. The full rule table is in How it works.

--offline

Never touch the network. Use only what is on disk.

With --offline, three lookups are turned off:

1. GitHub repo license lookup for a checkout with no recognizable local license file.
2. GitHub "is this repo public" check for each checkout with a GitHub remote. Because of this, published is always false offline, so copyleft code is never softened from blocker to obligation. See the published rule.
3. Hugging Face model card lookup for weights with no recognizable local license file.

Anything that needed a lookup gets the license unknown, which is classified as review. The report header says offline mode.

--json

Print one JSON object instead of the colored report:

{
  "ship_mode": "service",
  "root": "/absolute/path/you/scanned",
  "findings": [
    {
      "kind": "code",
      "path": "/absolute/path/vendor/agpl",
      "name": "example/agpl-thing",
      "license": "AGPL-3.0",
      "source": "/absolute/path/vendor/agpl/LICENSE",
      "published": false,
      "severity": "blocker",
      "headline": "AGPL over a network \u2014 you owe users your source",
      "detail": "AGPL-3.0 is the one license where ..."
    }
  ]
}

Field	Meaning
kind	code (a git checkout) or weights (a model folder).
path	Absolute folder where it was found.
name	owner/repo from the GitHub remote, org/name for Hugging Face weights, else the folder name.
license	License id or name, or unknown.
source	Where the license came from: a local file path, a https://github.com/... or https://huggingface.co/... URL, or "".
published	Only present on code findings. true when the checkout's GitHub repo is publicly readable.
severity	blocker, obligation, attribution, review or ok.
headline, detail	The human-readable explanation.

Notes taken from the code:

• --json always includes every finding, including ok and attribution. --all has no effect on JSON output.
• Findings are sorted by severity (blocker, obligation, attribution, review, ok) and then by name.
• Non-ASCII characters are escaped (for example the dash in headlines becomes \u2014), because the code uses json.dumps with its default ensure_ascii.
• For code findings where the local license file was not recognized, source can be the path of that file even though license is unknown or came from GitHub.

--all

Also show attribution and ok findings in the terminal report. By default they are counted in the summary line but not printed.

--depth N

How many folder levels to walk. Default: 6.

What the code does: the folder you scan is depth 0. A folder at depth N or deeper is not inspected and not descended into. So the default inspects the root and five levels below it. --depth 0 inspects nothing and reports 0 dependencies found.

Folders recognized as model weights are never descended into, whatever the depth. Folders recognized as git checkouts are descended into (so a model inside a checkout is still found).

Environment variables

Variable	Effect
GITHUB_TOKEN	Sent as Authorization: Bearer ... on GitHub license lookups. Use it if you hit GitHub's API rate limit.
GH_TOKEN	Used instead when GITHUB_TOKEN is not set.
NO_COLOR	If set to any value (even empty), disables ANSI colors.

Notes:

• Colors are also off whenever stdout is not a terminal (for example when piped or in most CI logs).
• The token is only sent on the license lookup. The separate "is this repo public" request is always unauthenticated.

There are no Hugging Face token settings. Lookups use the public https://huggingface.co/api/models/<repo_id> endpoint without authentication.

Exit codes

Code	When
0	Scan finished and there are no blockers.
1	At least one finding has severity blocker (terminal or --json).
2	Bad arguments, including a path that is not a directory (argparse error).

Fixed values (not configurable)

These are constants in the source. Changing them means editing the code.

What	Value	Where
Skipped folder names	.git (handled separately), node_modules, __pycache__, .venv, venv, site-packages, .mypy_cache, .pytest_cache, build, dist, .cache	SKIP_DIRS in detect.py
Hidden folders	Any folder name starting with . is skipped	scan() in detect.py
Weight file suffixes	.safetensors, .gguf, .bin, .mlmodelc, .mlpackage, .onnx, .pt, .pth, .tflite, .ckpt	WEIGHT_SUFFIXES
License file names	Any file whose name starts with license, licence or copying (any case)	find_license_file()
License text read	First 200,000 characters of the file, first 20,000 matched	read(), license_from_text()
Network timeouts	12 s for license lookups, 10 s for the public check	hf_license(), _gh_license(), _is_public()
User-Agent	modelaudit (+https://github.com/nicedreamzapp/modelaudit)	UA