licenseid 0.1.0

Get the SPDX License ID from license text

LicenseID

A portable SPDX License ID matcher.

licenseid takes license text as input and identifies the closest matched SPDX License ID using a hybrid search strategy (SQLite FTS5 trigram + RapidFuzz ranking + optional Java validation).

Features

• Hybrid strategy:
  • Tier 1: Broad recall using SQLite FTS5 with trigram tokenization.
  • Tier 2: Precision ranking using RapidFuzz (token set ratio) + Popularity weighting.
  • Tier 3: Optional final validation via tools-java if available.
• Unix philosophy: Parseable CLI output.

Installation

Install with pipx:

pipx install licenseid

Or using uv:

uv tool install licenseid

Usage

1. Update the license database

Before matching, you need to build the local license index:

licenseid update

2. Match a license

Match text from a file:

licenseid match LICENSE.txt

Match with Java validation enabled:

licenseid match LICENSE.txt --java

Match with popularity tie-breaker enabled:

licenseid match LICENSE.txt --pop

The tie-breaker is triggered only when candidate similarity scores differ by less than 0.02%.

3. Output formats

Default (Unix-friendly):

LICENSE_ID=Apache-2.0 SCORE=0.9850

JSON:

licenseid match LICENSE.txt --json

Configuration

• SPDX_TOOLS_JAR: Path to the tools-java jar for Tier 3 validation.

License

Apache-2.0