reuseify

Automate REUSE license annotation from git history.

reuseify inspects which files are missing license headers (via reuse lint), looks up their git commit authors, and applies reuse annotate, all from a single CLI.

Installation

uv pip install .

Usage

The workflow is two steps: collect authors → annotate files.

Step 1: collect authors

reuseify get-authors [OPTIONS]

Runs reuse lint, finds every file missing a license header, looks up its git commit authors, and writes a JSON file:

{
  "src/foo.py": ["Alice", "Bob"],
  "src/bar.c":  ["Alice"],
  "src/new.py": [] #NOT_IN_GIT
}

Files matching built-in patterns are always excluded: __pycache__, .venv, venv, .env, env, .git, .vscode, .idea, *.egg-info, *.pyc, dist, build, node_modules, .tox, .mypy_cache, .pytest_cache, .ruff_cache.

Files ignored by .gitignore are also excluded automatically.

Examples

# defaults
reuseify get-authors

# custom output path + include untracked files
reuseify get-authors --output authors.json --include-not-in-git

# add an extra exclusion pattern
reuseify get-authors --exclude reports --exclude "*.tmp"

Step 2: annotate files

reuseify annotate [OPTIONS] [REUSE ANNOTATE FLAGS...]

Reads the JSON file from Step 1 and calls reuse annotate for every file. --contributor flags are injected automatically from the JSON data. Both --copyright and --license must still be passed, otherwise the command fails fast, since reuse lint requires both a copyright notice and a license identifier (contributor alone isn't enough). All unrecognised flags are forwarded verbatim to reuse annotate, giving you full control over --copyright, --license, --year, --style, --fallback-dot-license, --force-dot-license, --skip-unrecognised, etc.

Output is grouped: all successes first, then skips, then failures, then finally a summary.

Examples

# basic
reuseify annotate \
    --copyright "2025 X-Men" \
    --license Apache-2.0 \
    --fallback-dot-license

# custom input + fallback contributor for untracked files
reuseify annotate \
    --input authors.json \
    --default-contributor "Charles Xavier" \
    --copyright "2025 X-Men" \
    --license Apache-2.0

# multiple default contributors
reuseify annotate \
    --default-contributor "Professor X" \
    --default-contributor "Cyclops" \
    --copyright "2025 X-Men" \
    --license MIT

Check compliance: lint

reuseify lint [OPTIONS]

Runs reuse lint to find git-tracked files missing a REUSE header or referencing a license whose text isn't in LICENSES/. If a reuseify.toml policy file exists (see below), it also checks that each governed file's actual declared license and copyright match its assigned rule, not just that some valid header is present.

Exit codes: 0 compliant, 1 REUSE or policy violations found, 2 an underlying reuse/reuseify tool failure (never treated as "compliant").

reuseify.toml: per-path license policy

For projects that use more than one license across different directories, add a reuseify.toml at the project root. It replaces the need to pass --copyright/--license on the command line, and turns reuseify lint into a stricter check: it verifies each governed file has the correct license for its path, not just some valid license.

[[rules]]
paths = ["src/**"]
copyright = "Sahil Jhawar"
license = "GPL-3.0-or-later"

[[rules]]
paths = ["vendor/**", "third_party/**"]
copyright = "Some Vendor"
license = "MIT"

# a rule matching an exact file always wins over a directory glob
[[rules]]
paths = ["vendor/special_file.py"]
copyright = "Sahil Jhawar"
license = "GPL-3.0-or-later"

[default]
copyright = "Sahil Jhawar"
license = "GPL-3.0-or-later"

• [[rules]]: paths is a glob (or list of globs) matched against the file's git-relative path. When a file matches more than one rule, the most specific one wins: an exact file path beats a directory glob, and among glob patterns, the longer one wins.
• [default]: used for any tracked file that matches no rule. Files matching neither a rule nor [default] are not governed by the policy and are ignored by both lint and annotate.
• Leave the year out of copyright ("Sahil Jhawar", not "2026 Sahil Jhawar"): reuse annotate always prepends the current year itself, so including one produces a duplicated year in the header.

With a reuseify.toml in place, reuseify annotate no longer requires --copyright/--license on the command line; each file is annotated with its matched rule's values automatically:

reuseify get-authors
reuseify annotate --default-contributor "Charles Xavier"

Any --copyright/--license still passed on the command line is used only as a fallback, for fields a matched rule or [default] leaves unset.

paths glob matching uses fnmatch, which is case-sensitive on POSIX/macOS and case-insensitive on Windows. reuseify only targets POSIX/Unix/macOS (see the classifiers in pyproject.toml), so write patterns case-exact with forward slashes.

Pre-commit hook

reuseify ships a pre-commit hook that runs reuseify lint and fails the commit if any git-tracked file is missing a REUSE license header.

Add this to your .pre-commit-config.yaml:

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/sahiljhawar/reuseify
    rev: 1.0.0  # use the latest tag
    hooks:
      - id: reuseify-lint

Then install it once per clone:

pre-commit install

Disclaimer

reuse annotate --help

This project is not affiliated with the REUSE project or its maintainers in any way.