licensit

licensit is a command-line tool to create LICENSE files.

Supported licenses

• GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0)
• Apache License 2.0 (Apache-2.0)
• BSD 2-Clause “Simplified” License (BSD-2-Clause)
• BSD 3-Clause “New” or “Revised” License (BSD-3-Clause)
• Boost Software License 1.0 (BSL-1.0)
• Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal (CC0-1.0)
• Eclipse Public License 2.0 (EPL-2.0)
• GNU General Public License v2.0 (GPL-2.0)
• GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0)
• GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 (LGPL-2.1)
• MIT License (MIT)
• Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0)
• The Unlicense (Unlicense)

Installation

Manual installation from GitHub

Compiled binary versions of licensit are uploaded to GitHub when a release is made. You can install licensit manually by downloading a release, extracting it, and copying the binary to a directory in your $PATH, such as /usr/local/bin.

Cargo

If you already have a Rust environment set up, you can use the cargo install command:

cargo install licensit

Cargo will build the licensit binary and place it in $HOME/.cargo.

Usage

licensit simplifies the process of creating and managing license files for your projects.

Listing Available Licenses

licensit list

Shows all supported licenses.

Showing License Content

To view the content of a specific license with the author and year filled in:

licensit show [LICENSE] [--user USER] [--year YEAR]

• [LICENSE]: The ID of the license you want to display (for example, mit, apache-2.0)
• --user [USER]: Specifies the license holder's name. If not provided, licensit will use the following sources in order to determine the user name:
  • LICENSE_AUTHOR environment variable
  • user.name entry in the $HOME/.gitconfig file
  • Username associated with the current effective user ID
• --year [YEAR]: Sets the year during which the license is effective. Defaults to the current year if not specified

To display just the template of a license (without any specific user or year information):

licensit show [LICENSE] --template

• [LICENSE]: The ID of the license whose template you want to display (for example, mit, apache-2.0)
• --template: Displays the license template with placeholders for the user and year. This option cannot be used with --user or --year

Adding a License to Your Project

To add a license file to your current directory:

licensit add [LICENSE] [--user USER] [--year YEAR]

Creates a LICENSE file in the current directory with the specified details.

Help and Information

licensit help [COMMAND]

Provides detailed help for a specific command (list, show, or add).

Limitations

To add a new license to licensit, place the license template file in the data/licenses directory or a subfolder. Then, update the licenses.yml file, specifying the short name, full name of the license, placeholders for the author and year (if needed), and the path to the template file within the data/licenses structure. This setup allows for the easy expansion of licensit by adding new licenses without altering the existing codebase.

In the current version of licensit, the tests primarily focus on command execution, covering basic scenarios such as specifying the user via an option or determining the author through an environment variable. Consequently, the automated tests are limited and utilize the MIT license template as a representative example. These tests do not cover scenarios without explicitly specifying a user or author, potentially missing out on capturing the full range of tool usage.

License

This project is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for the full licensing condition.