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licenses

Scan a repository for license text using ScanCode’s rule corpus. Matching runs from an embedded, prebuilt index with no network access, cgo, or Python.

The scanner uses whole-file hashes, exact token sequences, and SPDX-License-Identifier tag lines. It does not do fuzzy or sequence matching, so edits inside a license text can prevent a match. On a repository like Forgejo (~7 000 files) a scan finishes in about a second.

licenses .                                     scan the current directory
licenses -json path/to/repo > licenses.json    write a JSON report
licenses -scope all -max-files 0 path          include vendored dependencies
licenses -version                              print binary and corpus versions

JSON output reports each file’s detections with rule, expression, kind, method, score, and byte range. Detections carry identification set to identified, partial, or NOASSERTION depending on whether the expression names concrete licenses or ScanCode placeholders. Exit status 0 means detections were found, 2 means the scan was incomplete, 3 means no conclusive detections.

Library 

matcher, err := licenses.New()
if err != nil {
    return err
}
result, err := matcher.Match(ctx, text)

The corpus is loaded once per process and shared by every Matcher.

Installation 

brew tap git-pkgs/git-pkgs
brew trust --tap git-pkgs/git-pkgs
brew install licenses

or

go install github.com/git-pkgs/licenses/cmd/licenses@latest

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