lookup-license 0.1.30

Python tool to identify license from license text, urls, license names and package names.

Lookup License

Python tool to identify license from license text or license names.

With lookup-license you can lookup licenses from:

• text (e.g. an incorrect name such as "BSD3" or an entire license text)

• file (e.g. "src/LICENSE.txt")

• url (e.g. "https://github.com/hesa/lookup-license/blob/main/LICENSE")

• repositories

• package names

• purls

The first lookup takes a bit of time, due to initialization, so if you want to do a number of lookups you might want to use the interactive shell.

Using lookup-license

Lookup license without argument

If you do not provide an argument lookup-license assumes you want to copy/paste license information interactively. Let's say we want to lookup the license mit.

$ lookup-license
Enter license text and press Control-d.
>>> mit
MIT

In the example above:

• Enter license text and press Control-d. is usage information

• >>> is the lookup-license prompt

• mit is the input the user provided

• MIT is the result from lookup-license

Lookup license passed as an argument

You want to lookup the license "MIT AND BSD3":

$ lookup-license "MIT AND BSD3"
MIT AND BSD-3-Clause

Lookup license information in a file

If you pass a file name without the --file option the file name is treated as an argument containing license text. So the following will not lookup the license text in LICENSE.TXT.

$ lookup-license "LICENSE.TXT"

If you want lookup-license to read the content and try to identify the license based on that, then you need to use the --file option.

Interactively provide the file name

$ lookup-license --file
Enter license file name and press enter.
>>> LICENSE.txt
CC-BY-4.0

Provide the file name as an argument

$ lookup-license --file LICENSE.txt
CC-BY-4.0

Lookup license information form a URL

Same as described earlier with file names, if you pass a URL to lookup-license it will be treated as license information. If you want to lookup the URL content you need to use the --url option.

Interactively provide the URL

$ lookup-license --url
Enter license URL name and press enter.
>>> https://github.com/psf/requests/blob/main/LICENSE
Apache-2.0

Provide the URL as an argument

$ lookup-license --url https://github.com/psf/requests/blob/main/LICENSE
Apache-2.0

interactive shell

Here is an example session for looking up the text mit followed the URL https://github.com/psf/requests/blob/main/LICENSE:

$ lookup-license --shell
Welcome to the LookupLicense shell. Type help or ? to list commands.

>>> text 
Enter license text and press Control-d.
>>> mit
['MIT']
>>> url 
Enter license URL name and press enter.
>>> https://github.com/psf/requests/blob/main/LICENSE
['Apache-2.0']

Looking up locense for packages and repositories

With lookup-license you can lookup the license for packages and repositories using:

• Purls (Gem, github, Pypi, Swift)

• Gitrepo (github, gitlab, freedesktop)

• Package names (Gem, github, Pypi, Swift)

See Purl and package managers for more information.

Acknowledgements

Lookup license is a tiny wrapper on top of the following python modules:

• scancode and ScanCode LicenseDB used to when looking up license text. Big thanks to Nexb.

• foss-licenses, used when looking up license identifiers.