Extras Exporter helps you comply with Godot's MIT License

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Here’s a problem you may not have thought about: MIT license compliance. Godot is MIT licensed which means that while you are free to use Godot for any purpose whatsoever, if you redistribute it, you have to include its license in your distribution. When you export a build, the executable file contains the Godot binary, which means you must distribute Godot’s license along with your build.

There are of course any number of ways you could achieve this, but one of the easiest would be to simply include the license file in your build directory. That way all your users can easily find the license file(s). Unfortunately, Godot does not provide an easy out of the box solution for including additional project files in the build directory of your project. By default any files included in the project are only included in the resulting *.pck file which means that the average user will not be able to read Godot’s license (or any other licenses you might need to include).

To solve this problem, I created a tiny little plugin, Extras Exporter, that is intended to enable developers to easily and automatically copy any files the developers choose into the build directory whenever the project is exported. You can find the project on GitHub:

Usage is pretty simple:

  1. Download the repo as a ZIP file and extract the contents to the addons/extras_exporter directory in your project.
  2. Ensure that the plugin is enabled in your Project Settings > Plugins section.
  3. Go to Project > Export In the menu bar.
  4. In your export template, select the Options tab and scroll to the bottom.
  5. You should see a header called “Extras Exporter” that has two settings under it, Additional Files and Write Version File.
  6. Add any files you would like to be included in the build directory here.
  7. Write Version File let’s you output a text file called version.txt to your build directory that copies the version setting in Project Settings > Config to the first line of the file. This could be handy to help users easily identify which version of your build they are using.
  8. Export your project, and you’ll see the files under Aditional Files copied to your build directory as well as the version file if you selected Write Version File. That’s all there is to it!

I hope this makes it much easier for you to include licenses or any other files you want to be readable for users in your build outputs!