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.

Metadata

Release files for lookup-license 0.1.31

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for lookup-license 0.1.31
File	Size	Uploaded
lookup_license-0.1.31.tar.gz	42.6 kB	Aug 19, 2026	Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for lookup-license 0.1.31
File	Interpreter	ABI	Platform	Reset
lookup_license-0.1.31-py2.py3-none-any.whl 53.8 kB Aug 19, 2026	Python 2, Python 3	none	any	Details

Total release size: 96.4 kB

Release files / lookup_license-0.1.31.tar.gz

Download URL	lookup_license-0.1.31.tar.gz
Size	42.6 kB
Tags	Source
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`a25a57ce34024657f5a7501ecef7ef48ec84f1deea954a758b907d39a71b132d`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`a8e3de0b857540234e452aca79872dccbb5d3ae9440e0145fafc7886f2b3b288`
Upload date	Aug 19, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14`

Release files / lookup_license-0.1.31-py2.py3-none-any.whl

Download URL	lookup_license-0.1.31-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Size	53.8 kB
Tags	Python 2 Python 3
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`fa2d575e6d2b79b5639e0119a004fe04ea18165b6135a7205ff3a236df9aa7d2`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`02c1d7030e0c568c3f23fc7b8262caa66b22f4e41134b664ef320a4f9ed95bf2`
Upload date	Aug 19, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14`