badges/shields · error · NotFound

license not found

Error message

license not found

What it means

This NotFound error comes from the Packagist license badge transform. After finding the latest release with findLatestRelease, it reads that release's 'license' field; when the release metadata has no license array (empty/missing), the badge cannot be rendered.

Source

Thrown at services/packagist/packagist-license.service.js:76

    },
  }

  static defaultBadgeData = {
    label: 'license',
  }

  transform({ json, user, repo }) {
    const packageName = this.getPackageName(user, repo)

    const versions = BasePackagistService.expandPackageVersions(
      json,
      packageName,
    )

    const version = this.findLatestRelease(versions)
    const license = version.license
    if (!license) {
      throw new NotFound({ prettyMessage: 'license not found' })
    }

    return { license }
  }

  async handle({ user, repo }, { server }) {
    const json = await this.fetch({ user, repo, schema, server })

    const { license } = this.transform({ json, user, repo })

    return renderLicenseBadge({ license })
  }
}

View on GitHub (pinned to 766fd8bc89)

Solutions

  1. Add a 'license' key (e.g. "license": "MIT") to the package's composer.json and push a new release
  2. Check the package's composer.json on packagist.org to confirm the license field is genuinely missing
  3. Remove the license badge if the package intentionally has no license
  4. Pin the badge to a specific older version that does declare a license

Example fix

// before (composer.json)
{ "name": "vendor/pkg", "description": "..." }
// after
{ "name": "vendor/pkg", "description": "...", "license": "MIT" }
Defensive patterns

Strategy: validation

Validate before calling

const latest = await getPackagistLatestRelease(user, repo)
if (!latest || !Array.isArray(latest.license) || latest.license.length === 0) throw new Error('Latest release has no license declared in composer.json')

Type guard

function hasLicense(release) {
  return typeof release === 'object' && release !== null && Array.isArray(release.license) && release.license.length > 0
}

Try / catch

try {
  const badge = await license(user, repo)
} catch (e) {
  if (e instanceof NotFound && e.message === 'license not found') return { label: 'license', message: 'unknown', color: 'lightgrey' }
  throw e
}

Prevention

When it happens

Trigger: Requesting a license badge for a package whose latest release on Packagist has a missing or empty license field in its composer.json (no 'license' key declared).

Common situations: Open-source packages whose authors never added a license key to composer.json; private/unlicensed packages; a newly published release that dropped the license field.

Understand the failure class

Background: 'Could not be found', 'does not exist', 'not found in database': the resource-not-found family when an ID, slug, key, or URI lookup comes back empty — this error's family across 20 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of badges/shields@766fd8bc89 (2026-08-30). Data as JSON: /api/errors/7bfda3206427774d. Report an issue: GitHub.