licenser

licenser

A CLI for choosing and generating software license files. Uses data from choosealicense.com.

Why

My usual flow was tedious:

1. Open choosealicense.com
2. Find the license I want
3. wget it or copy-paste into the repo
4. Edit placeholders by hand

There's an existing CLI (choosealicense-cli) but it looked unmaintained and was missing features I wanted. So I wrote this.

Demo

Install

Requires Go 1.25+

go install github.com/devadathanmb/licenser@latest

Or build from source:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/devadathanmb/licenser.git

# Navigate and build the project
cd licenser && make build

# Run the binary
./licenser --help

Usage

Running licenser with no arguments in a TTY launches an interactive wizard.

For non-interactive use:

# list all available licenses
licenser list

# show details for a specific license
licenser info mit

# search by rules (permissions, conditions, limitations)
licenser search --permits patent-use --no-requires disclose-source

# compare licenses side by side (2 or 3)
licenser compare mit apache-2.0

# generate a LICENSE file
# author, email, year, and project are auto-detected from git config when available
licenser generate mit --author "Jane Doe" --year 2026

# refresh local license data
licenser update

Commands

list, info, search, and compare support --json for scripting.

generate flags: --author, --email, --year, --project, -o/--output, --stdout, -f/--force

search flags: --permits, --requires, --forbids, --no-requires

Development

make build   # build binary → ./licenser
make test    # run all tests with race detection
make fmt     # check formatting (gofmt -s)
make vet     # run go vet
make lint    # fmt + vet + golangci-lint (if installed)

Credits

• License metadata and texts from choosealicense.com
• Inspired by choosealicense-cli by @lord63

Not legal advice. And yes, this repo's own LICENSE was generated using this tool.