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.