How GitHub's Legal Cheat Sheet Works and Why Deploy choosealicense.com Locally
You've probably encountered the license selection form when creating a new repository on GitHub. A few clicks, and your project gets a file with the correct copyright and current year. Few people realize that all this logic, concise explanations, and rights highlighted with icons live in an open repository.
The project grew from a simple idea. Developers rarely understand legal nuances and don't want to read dozens of pages of legal text. They need a straightforward answer: what you can do with the code and what you can't. The website fulfills this need, and the repository itself serves as the backend for GitHub's license system.
Why This Repository Exists
First and foremost, it's a static Jekyll website. Its main goal is to break down complex legal documents into understandable categories without making value judgments. The authors don't push a specific license on you—they provide a tool for making your own choice.
Beyond running the website, the repository's content is regularly imported into the Ruby gem Licensee. This library is what powers GitHub itself, determining the license type in your projects, displaying its status in the repository interface, and serving data through the GitHub API.
How Licenses Are Structured Internally
The entire magic of the site and integrations is built on structured descriptions of each document. The folder contains Markdown files. Each license has a YAML header (front matter) and the full legal text.
The YAML header defines metadata:
Rules are divided into three categories: permissions, conditions, and restrictions. The full explanation of individual atomic rules like or is stored separately in a file. If you need to add a new condition, you describe it once in and reference it in the license files.
When creating a new repository, GitHub takes the template and substitutes real values for the built-in variables:
- or the author's name
- the current year
- for the repository name
- for a link to the project
Automatic Builds and Multilingual Support
The site supports translations of the interface and brief annotations through the Jekyll plugin. The actual legal license texts are intentionally not translated to avoid distorting the legal meaning of the original documents.
Since doesn't belong to GitHub Pages' standard list of supported plugins, deployment is handled through GitHub Actions. The workflow builds the site and publishes the ready static bundle to the branch.
Running the Project Locally
You can deploy a local copy of the site in a couple of minutes. You'll need the compilers and installed.
On macOS, dependencies are installed via Homebrew:
On Ubuntu or Debian, the standard package manager is sufficient:
After that, clone the repository along with submodules and run the build scripts:
The site will be available at . You can edit files in and immediately see the results in your browser.
Using the Repository in Your Projects
A local build or fork of the project comes in handy in various situations:
- Creating an internal legal documents database. Large companies often have their own rules for using third-party code. You can fork the repository, add corporate requirements, and deploy an internal reference guide.
- Generating licenses in CLI utilities. If you're writing your own project template generator, this is a convenient source for vetted LICENSE texts with auto-substitution variables.
- Automated codebase audits. Based on the rule files in, you can easily write a simple linter to check third-party dependencies in your CI/CD pipeline.
- Learning the architecture of multilingual Jekyll sites. The custom build pipeline with the plugin serves as a great example for your own static projects.
Summary
The repository is a great example of turning boring legal documents into a convenient data structure. The project combines a user-friendly web interface, machine-readable metadata, and auto-substitution mechanisms. If you need to organize licensing in your own projects or create a handy reference for your team, the source code of this site makes an excellent starting point.
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