"All Rights Reserved" license in package.json

Question

I have a small node.js project that is company-internal and will not be released publicly or shared with third parties. It certainly will not be contributed to any public package repositories.

But when I run npm install I always get the following error:

npm WARN package.json <<myproject>>@0.1.0 license should be a valid SPDX license expression

The desired license is: "copyright by us and all rights reserved". I could not find anything that looked applicable in the SPDX license list. The suggestion in this answer does not work either. If I simply remove the license field from package.json the error changes to no license field.

How do I get npm install to show no errors or warnings without putting a license reference in there that we do not want to use?

Answer 1

According to the new npm specification you can use { "license": "UNLICENSED"} if you do not wish to grant others the right to use a private or unpublished package under any terms.

Please refer the full details here

So you might not get the error you mentioned.