Install Provenant License Scanner on Ubuntu 26.04

Provenant is an open-source software provenance scanner designed to analyze source code repositories and extract licensing information, copyright references, package metadata, file details, and related software attribution data. It helps identify the origin and licensing characteristics of software components, making it useful for open-source compliance reviews and software inventory tasks. This tutorial explains how to install Provenant license scanner on Ubuntu 26.04.

Install Provenant

Download the latest Provenant release archive and extract the binary into /usr/local/bin:

curl -sSL https://github.com/getprovenant/provenant/releases/latest/download/provenant-linux-x86_64.tar.gz \
  | sudo tar xz -C /usr/local/bin provenant

Confirm that Provenant is available on the system by checking the version:

provenant --version

Testing Provenant

A small open-source project can be used as a sample scan target. For example, download the Rust bytes repository:

curl -sSLo bytes-master.tar.gz https://github.com/tokio-rs/bytes/archive/master.tar.gz

tar xf bytes-master.tar.gz

Run Provenant against the extracted source tree:

provenant scan --html report.html --license --package ./bytes-master --ignore 'tests/*'

The command generates an HTML report containing detected licenses, and file-level provenance details. Example license findings:

path                        start  end  what     value
./bytes-master/Cargo.toml   10     10   license  mit
./bytes-master/LICENSE      3      25   license  mit
./bytes-master/README.md    3      25   license  mit
./bytes-master/README.md    65     67   license  mit

Uninstall Provenant

If Provenant is no longer needed, delete the installed binary:

sudo rm -rf /usr/local/bin/provenant

Delete the Provenant cache directory:

rm -rf ~/.cache/provenant