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June 22, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

CLI tool for building Licenses files. Easily.

mklicense Version Downloads workflow provenance



Why should I use this?

  • It writes your details (year, author, project description) into the file, which the GitHub generator does not always do.
  • It is friendly for beginners and busy people: no flags to memorize, just answer a couple of prompts.
  • It generates the file locally, so you never hand your LICENSE details to a third-party service.

Install

npm install -g mklicense

Usage

Run the command inside your project folder:

mklicense

The CLI walks you through a short interactive flow:

  1. Select a license from the list (see below).
  2. For MIT, Apache, GPL and AGPL, enter the starting year and the author name (both prefilled, the author defaults to your git config user.name).
  3. For GPL and AGPL, enter a one-line project description.

mklicense then writes a LICENSE file in the current directory. It is fully interactive and takes no command-line flags. Requires Node >=18.

Licenses included

  • Unlicense
  • MIT
  • Apache 2.0
  • MPL 2.0
  • GNU LGPL 3.0
  • GNU GPL 3.0
  • GNU AGPL 3.0

You talk about trust. So, where are all the licenses located?

mklicense extracts licenses from https://choosealicense.com/ (which is curated by GitHub), and creates a LICENSE file for your desired project. I have no control over any license, which is a good thing for you and me.

License

MIT (c) Cezar Augusto.