reuse

What it is and what it does

reuse is a compliance tool built by the Free Software Foundation Europe to help developers follow the REUSE recommendations—a standardized framework for declaring copyright and licensing in software projects. It validates that your project includes proper SPDX license identifiers and copyright notices in each file, stores licenses in a LICENSES/ directory, and confirms compliance against the REUSE specification.

The tool provides a CLI with commands to lint projects for compliance, annotate files with copyright and license headers, download licenses, generate SPDX documents, and convert legacy .reuse/dep5 configurations. It works across multiple version control systems and can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines via Docker or as a pre-commit hook. The package depends on Jinja2, license-expression, python-debian, tomlkit, attrs, click, and python-magic to parse licenses, render templates, and detect file types.

Use it for:

• Verify a project meets REUSE specification requirements before release or in CI/CD pipelines
• Automatically add SPDX copyright and license headers to source files across a project
• Generate an SPDX document describing all files and their licenses for compliance audits
• Validate individual files for correct REUSE compliance headers during code review
• Convert legacy .reuse/dep5 configuration files to the newer REUSE.toml format

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

reuse is a command-line tool that validates and enforces REUSE compliance—a standardized approach to declaring copyright and licensing information in software projects.

Yes. reuse is actively maintained, has no known vulnerabilities, and is the standard tool for REUSE compliance. Install friction is moderate but manageable. The copyleft license is appropriate for a compliance tool. Use it if you need to demonstrate or enforce standardized copyright and licensing practices in your project, especially for open-source software or when required by legal or organizational policy.

Install

reuse on PyPI

pip install reuse

uv add reuse

poetry add reuse

Installing reuse

Before you install

Medium install friction due to 7 runtime dependencies including Jinja2, license-expression, and python-magic. Maintenance is active with recent releases; the project is actively maintained by FSFE. Requires Python 3.10+. Optional system dependencies (libmagic, Git, Mercurial, Pijul, Jujutsu) improve functionality but are not required.

License in practice

Licensed under Apache-2.0, CC0-1.0, CC-BY-SA-4.0, and GPL-3.0-or-later (copyleft treatment). This multi-license model reflects the tool's own compliance with REUSE recommendations. Users should be aware of the copyleft obligations if they modify and redistribute the package.

Quickstart

pip install reuse
reuse lint

Requires Python 3.10+. libmagic is optional but recommended; without it, file encoding detection is slower. Version control systems (Git, Mercurial, Pijul, Jujutsu) are optional but needed for correct .gitignore handling.

Verify before relying

• Exact performance impact of missing libmagic on large projects
• Whether all 7 runtime dependencies are strictly required or if some are optional extras

Package facts

Evidence: reuse-6.2.0-cp310-cp310-manylinux_2_41_x86_64.whl

Tags

More Quality Assurance packages