---
id: licensecheck
version: "2026.0.8"
license: MIT
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# licensecheck — Output the licenses used by dependencies and check if these are compatible with the project license

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 489.0K/mo

## What it is and what it does

licensecheck is a command-line tool that reads your project's dependencies (from pyproject.toml or requirements files) and reports the license of each one, then checks whether those licenses are compatible with your project's declared license. It uses configurator, depgather, license-expression, and requests to gather package metadata and parse license strings, then outputs results as tables, JSON, CSV, HTML, or markdown.

The tool is designed for developers and teams who need to audit their dependency licenses for compliance or compatibility concerns. It supports filtering by license type, dependency groups, and extras, and can fail the check if incompatible licenses are found. The output includes explicit compatibility markers and can highlight only failing packages.

Use it for:

- Audit all dependencies in a Python project to ensure their licenses are compatible with your project's license before release.
- Generate a license report in CSV or JSON format for legal or compliance documentation.
- Filter dependencies by license type (e.g., MIT, Apache) to identify which packages use specific license families.
- Check only development dependencies (via --groups) to separate runtime and dev-time license concerns.
- Integrate into CI/CD to fail the build if any dependency uses a license you've marked as incompatible.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Scans a project's dependencies to extract their licenses and checks compatibility with the project's own license, reporting results in multiple formats.

Yes. The tool is actively maintained, has no known vulnerabilities, low install friction, and solves a real compliance problem. Use it if you need to audit or report on dependency licenses; the MIT license and permissive runtime dependencies make it safe to add to any project.

## Install

pip install licensecheck
uv add licensecheck
poetry add licensecheck

## Installing licensecheck

Before you install: Low friction install with 11 runtime dependencies, all permissively licensed. Active maintenance with a release 57 days ago and last commit on 2026-06-21.

License in practice: MIT license is permissive; you can use this tool freely in commercial and proprietary projects without restriction.

Quickstart:

pip install licensecheck

licensecheck

# or with options:
licensecheck --license MIT --format json

Requires Python 3.12 or later.

Verify before relying:

- Whether the tool correctly identifies and interprets all SPDX license identifiers in practice.
- How the tool handles packages with missing or ambiguous license metadata.
- Performance characteristics when scanning projects with hundreds of transitive dependencies.

## Package facts

- License: MIT (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 489.0K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

dependency license checker, license compatibility verification, project license audit, check dependency licenses, license compliance tool, license-compliance, dependency-audit, cli-tool

[View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/licensecheck) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/licensecheck/)