LicenseKit

The interactive CLI tool that helps you choose, understand, and add the right license to your project.

LicenseKit goes beyond existing tools by providing clear explanations, a guided wizard, and a seamless experience -- all from your terminal.

Features

Interactive Wizard Mode

• Guided questionnaire to help you find the perfect license based on your needs
• Questions about your project type, commercial use, patent grants, copyleft preferences, etc.
• Smart filtering that narrows down licenses based on your answers
• Recommended licenses ranked by relevance to your use case

License Explorer

• Browse all available open-source licenses from an interactive list
• Search and filter licenses by name or keyword
• Detailed view for each license showing:
  • Description -- What the license is about in plain language
  • Permissions -- What others can do (commercial use, modification, distribution, etc.)
  • Conditions -- What is required (copyright notice, state changes, same license, etc.)
  • Limitations -- What is excluded (liability, warranty, patent use, etc.)
• Side-by-side comparison of two licenses

License Generation

• Automatically creates a LICENSE file (plain text) in your project root
• Interactive prompts to fill in placeholders (author name, year)
• Auto-detection of author name from Git config (user.name) and current year
• Support for custom output path (--output, -o)
• Confirmation prompt before overwriting an existing LICENSE file

Internationalization (i18n)

• License explanations available in English and French
• Extensible to other languages via locale files
• Auto-detect system language or specify with --lang

Installation

# Run directly with npx (no install needed)
npx @drosscend/licensekit

# Or with bunx
bunx @drosscend/licensekit

# Or install globally
npm install -g @drosscend/licensekit
bun add -g @drosscend/licensekit

Usage

licensekit

Launches the interactive wizard that guides you through the license selection process.

Options

| Flag | Short | Description | |------|-------|-------------| | --author | -a | Author name for the license | | --year | -y | Year for the license (default: current year) | | --output | -o | Output file path (default: ./LICENSE) | | --lang | -l | Language for descriptions: en or fr (default: auto-detect) | | --help | -h | Show help | | --version | -v | Show version |

Preview

+  LicenseKit -- Choose the right license for your project
|
o  What type of project is this?
|  > Open source library
|    Personal/hobby project
|    Commercial/proprietary
|    Documentation/content
|
o  Do you want to allow commercial use?
|  > Yes
|    No
|
o  Should modifications be shared under the same license?
|  > No (permissive)
|    Yes (copyleft)
|    Only for library usage (weak copyleft)
|
-  Based on your answers, here are the recommended licenses:
|
|  1. MIT License -- Simple and permissive
|     [+] Commercial use  [+] Modification  [+] Distribution
|     [i] Include copyright  [!] No liability
|
|  2. Apache License 2.0 -- Permissive with patent protection
|     [+] Commercial use  [+] Modification  [+] Patent use
|     [i] Include copyright  [i] State changes  [!] No trademark
|
o  Which license do you want to use?
|  > MIT License
|
o  Author name:
|  Kevin Veronesi (from git config)
|
o  Year:
|  2025
|
+  Done: LICENSE file created successfully!

Supported Licenses

LicenseKit supports the most commonly used open-source licenses, sourced from the GitHub Licenses API and choosealicense.com:

| License | SPDX Identifier | Type | |---------|-----------------|------| | MIT License | MIT | Permissive | | Apache License 2.0 | Apache-2.0 | Permissive | | GNU GPLv3 | GPL-3.0-only | Copyleft | | GNU GPLv2 | GPL-2.0-only | Copyleft | | GNU AGPLv3 | AGPL-3.0-only | Copyleft | | GNU LGPLv3 | LGPL-3.0-only | Weak Copyleft | | Mozilla Public License 2.0 | MPL-2.0 | Weak Copyleft | | BSD 2-Clause | BSD-2-Clause | Permissive | | BSD 3-Clause | BSD-3-Clause | Permissive | | ISC License | ISC | Permissive | | The Unlicense | Unlicense | Public Domain | | Creative Commons Zero v1.0 | CC0-1.0 | Public Domain | | Boost Software License 1.0 | BSL-1.0 | Permissive | | Eclipse Public License 2.0 | EPL-2.0 | Weak Copyleft |

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.