hinagata

A lightweight CLI that generates the boilerplate files for a new project: a LICENSE and a .gitignore. Pick from a filterable list, confirm the details, and get the file.

Also available as the shorter hina.

Quick start

uvx hinagata

That runs hinagata once without installing anything. It walks you through choosing a license, then gitignore templates. 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

Running hinagata with no command in a terminal goes through every select one after another: the license (plus author and year where the license needs them), then the gitignore templates. Without a terminal it prints the help instead.

The two steps are also available as separate commands, license and gitignore. Run either without arguments to choose interactively. Everything can also be passed as arguments and flags, which skips the matching prompt and makes the command scriptable.

License

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

Gitignore

hinagata gitignore Python Linux VisualStudioCode   # write ./.gitignore
hinagata gitignore Node --append                   # add to an existing file
hinagata gitignore Rust -o - > .gitignore          # print to stdout
hinagata gitignore --list                          # show the templates

Each template is written under a ### Name ### header, so you can see where a block came from. Without arguments you get a checklist where you can type to filter and pick as many templates as you need.

If the file already exists, a terminal session asks whether to append, overwrite or cancel. Without a terminal the command fails unless you pass --force or --append. Appending is safe to repeat: templates whose header is already in the file are skipped.

Short alias

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

hina license MIT -a "Ada Lovelace"
hina gitignore Python

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 license MIT
pipx run --spec hinagata hina license 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.

Bundled gitignore templates

About 240 templates from github/gitignore (CC0): the language and tool templates such as Python, Node and Rust, plus the Global ones for editors and operating systems such as VisualStudioCode, Linux and macOS. Refresh them with python scripts/update_gitignore.py, which also records the upstream commit in src/hinagata/data/gitignore/SOURCE.

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