licgen 📃

licgen is a fast, reliable, and dependency-free CLI tool designed to instantly generate standard open-source LICENSE files for your projects.

Whether you need a quick permissive license for a hobby script or a strict copyleft license for an enterprise repository, licgen handles template rendering, copyright holder injection, and automated project/year detection out of the box.

✨ Features

• 🗃️ Curated License Library: Includes all major open-source licenses (MIT, Apache 2.0, GPLv3, AGPLv3, Unlicense, and more) pre-loaded as native resources.
• 🤖 Smart Autocomplete & Detection: Automatically resolves the current copyright year and dynamically infers the project name from your current directory if omitted.
• 🔍 Interactive Discovery: Built-in quick list command (--list) to instantly view all available license types directly in your terminal.
• 📦 Zero Dependencies: Pure Python implementation with zero third-party dependencies, leveraging modern importlib.resources and argparse for maximum portability and speed.
• 🪶 Lightweight & Global: Seamlessly installs as a global binary command that can be invoked from any directory.

🎯 Motivation

While creating open-source projects (like pairgen or manigen), setting up the right LICENSE file is always annoying. You usually have to search for the template online, copy-paste it, and manually edit the year and author name.

licgen was created to standardize and automate this routine into a single, straightforward CLI command. It perfectly complements your existing development workflow, making project initialization effortless and compliant from second one.

📦 Installation

You can install licgen directly from PyPI using pip:

pip install licgen

Or, if you use uv (recommended for CLI tools):

uv tool install licgen

🚀 Quick Start

Generate a standard MIT license for the current year in your working directory:

licgen mit -a "Your Name"

💡 Advanced Usage Examples

1. Listing Available Licenses

If you are unsure which license type string to pass, list all built-in templates:

licgen -l

2. Setup with Specific Year and Project Name

Generate desired license, explicitly defining the project name and a custom copyright year:

licgen apache-2.0 -a "Your name" -y 2048 -p "Project name"

3. Custom Output Directory

Initialize a license inside a specific sub-folder or a newly initialized git repository path:

licgen mit -a "Your name" -o ./my-new-project

🛠️ CLI Reference

🤝 Contributing

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/ash1ra/licgen
cd licgen

2. Install dependencies using uv

uv sync
# On Windows
.venv\Scripts\activate
# on Unix or MacOS
source .venv/bin/activate

3. Format and lint the code

uv run ruff format .
uv run ruff check .

4. Run the tests

uv run pytest tests/ -v

5. Submit a pull request

If you'd like to contribute, please fork the repository and open a pull request to the main branch.