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 frameworks 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$/

This project follows the Semantic Versioning.

See all versions

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 from the publiccodeyml.github.io repository.

• uv

sphinx-build can be used to compile all source files of the current checkout 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.

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

The published website puts every version line of the Standard side by side, one directory per major version (/v0/, /v1/, ...) with a version switcher on each page. Each line is built from the newest release tag of its major version (v0.8.0, ...), or from its draft branch (1.0-rc, ...) while unreleased, using the conf.py and templates of the current checkout, see poly.py. Tags come with the clone, draft branches must exist locally (e.g. git branch 1.0-rc origin/1.0-rc), then:

uv run sphinx-polyversion poly.py build/html

To preview the switcher on the current checkout alone, without building every branch:

uv run sphinx-polyversion poly.py build/html -l

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.

• libpubliccode

  Parser and validator library. Reference implementation of the specification.

  • Bindings: PHP (via FFI)
  • CI: GitHub Action, GitLab CI
  • Validator API: RESTful API returning validation errors and warnings

• publiccode-crawler

  Crawler to discover and collect descriptor files for catalogs.

• open-catalog-api

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

  • CLI client to query the catalog API (alpha)

• 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).

Licensed under the CC0-1.0.