@license

The @license tag states which license governs the element it decorates (or, written once near the top of a file, the file as a whole). Most of the time that means pointing at the canonical URL for the license text — an OSI license page, a link to the project's own LICENSE file — but some licenses are commonly identified by name alone, in which case the tag carries only a description such as MIT or Proprietary.

"@license" ( <URL> [ <Description> ] | <Description> )

Parsing a @license tag produces a LicenseTag instance:

final class LicenseTag extends Tag
{
    public function __construct(
        string $name,
        public ?UrlReference $url = null,
        ?DescriptionInterface $description = null,
    ) {
        parent::__construct($name, $description);
    }
}

It exposes $url — the parsed UrlReference, or null when the license was given by name only, with the name itself available through the tag's $description. Note that $url, unlike almost every other exposed property across these tags, is not readonly in the actual source — a small inconsistency worth knowing about if you're relying on immutability.

Defined by phpDocumentor's own page; unlike most tags in this section, @license is not part of the PSR-19 draft's tag list.

05 July 2026