hinagata

A lightweight license generator CLI. Pick a license from a filterable list, confirm the author and year, and get a LICENSE file.

Also available as the shorter hina.

Quick start

uvx hinagata

That runs hinagata once without installing anything. To keep it around:

uv tool install hinagata
hinagata

Installation

pip installs into the current environment, so use a virtual environment or pip install --user hinagata. With uv, uv pip install hinagata works the same way.

To use the development version, install from Git or from a clone:

uv tool install git+https://github.com/keksiqc/hinagata
uv sync && uv run hinagata

python -m hinagata also works wherever the package is installed.

Usage

Run without arguments to choose a license interactively. Everything can also be passed as flags, which skips the matching prompt and makes the command scriptable:

hinagata MIT --author "Ada Lovelace" --year 2026   # write ./LICENSE
hinagata Apache-2.0 --output LICENSE.txt --force   # custom file, overwrite
hinagata ISC -o - > LICENSE                        # print to stdout
hinagata --list                                    # show the catalogue

Author and year are only asked for licenses whose text contains them (MIT, ISC, BSD, 0BSD). The others, such as the GPL family and Apache-2.0, are written verbatim.

Short alias

hina is an alias for hinagata and takes the same arguments, which is handy for everyday use once it is installed:

hina MIT -a "Ada Lovelace"

It ships inside the hinagata package rather than as a package of its own, so uvx hina would fetch an unrelated project from PyPI. To run the alias without installing, name the package explicitly:

uvx --from hinagata hina MIT
pipx run --spec hinagata hina MIT

Bundled licenses

MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD-2-Clause, BSD-3-Clause, ISC, 0BSD, BSL-1.0, MPL-2.0, LGPL-3.0, GPL-2.0, GPL-3.0, AGPL-3.0, Unlicense and CC0-1.0. The texts come from choosealicense.com.

Development

Install the project and its development dependencies:

uv sync

Run the checks:

uv run ruff format --check .
uv run ruff check .
uv run ty check .
uv run pytest