Lichen – Manage and create code licenses on the CLI and with TOML
Hey! I'm Miles, I built this tool to be a fast and reliable solution for generating licenses on the CLI. Licensing has always been a point of stress for me, with how much is at stake. If I copy one from the wrong website, the version I download is the wrong one, or any number of mishaps, my whole code is at risk. We see this fiasco play out all the time. We shake our saddened heads and go on. No longer! Lichen is designed to generate licenses sensibly with three words on the CLI. `lic gen MIT`. Or in a `.lichen.toml` in your project root. Add authors/maintainers with --authors, date it…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey! I'm Miles, I built this tool to be a fast and reliable solution for generating licenses on the CLI. Licensing has always been a point of stress for me, with how much is at stake. If I copy one from the wrong website, the version I download is the wrong one, or any number of mishaps, my whole code is at risk. We see this fiasco play out all the time. We shake our saddened heads and go on. No longer! Lichen is designed to generate licenses sensibly with three words on the CLI. `lic gen MIT`. Or in a `.lichen.toml` in your project root. Add authors/maintainers with --authors, date it with --date, license specific parts with exclude patterns and double licenses. Project big or small, it's got everything (I think). (Tell me what it's missing please). It uses SPDX licenses for correctness. Written in Rust, you'll know you're safe, and if you want to be extra cautious, feel free to create license headers on all your files (Fast too! Can do this for the entire cargo project in 22s uncached). I'm happy to answer any questions/concerns/whatever about my tool, it's my biggest project to date (And therefore my most bug-ridden...)
Does the same job
all alternatives →- KAKeygen – A dead-simple software licensing API built for developers2017 · keygen.sh · ▲190
- LALicensed, a CLI to help you choose and add licenses to your projects2018 · github.com · ▲10
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Hey HN, Lich is a worktree aware local dev stack orchestrator. Simply put, it allows you to run multiple copies of your development stack from different worktrees with different code in parallel without going insane. I built Lich because I’ve found myself increasingly using multiple parallel coding agents for development work. I wanted my coding agents to each have independent copies of my development stack to be able to test and validate their own work well. I found that trying to do this totally broke the way I have normally setup tooling for local development. Ports conflict, the UI from…
- IMI made a simple software licensing platform for developers2025 · keyforge.dev · ▲6
Hey HN, A few months ago I realized licensing my app wasn't as straightforward as I expected. There was too much setup just to create a license, and the customer experience was not great. All I wanted was for licenses to be generated automatically when I got paid, and for customers to manage their own licenses. So I built Keyforge, a simple software licensing platform for developers. It integrates with Stripe so that licenses are created automatically when someone purchases or subscribes to your product. There's also a self-serve customer portal where users can manage their licenses,…
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Hi, I’ve been exploring Claude 3.5 code generation abilities for a while and it looks like it can generate more consistent code than other models. However it would still be unmaintainable if you ask it to write a lot of code and it still sucks at system design. So, I’ve been playing around the idea of using the code repository with a template for directory layout and infrastructure, then adding the repository information to Claude and asking it to generate code. It seems that it works, if I pass the structure of some OpenAPI based backend it can update the API definition and implementation…
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