Enterprise Edition License Management

The Enterprise Edition of ArangoDB requires a license to run the Enterprise Edition. How to set a license key and to retrieve information about the current license via the JavaScript API is described below. There is also an HTTP API. Also check the ArangoDB Kubernetes Operator for more details on how to set a license key.

Initial Installation

The first installation of any ArangoDB Enterprise Edition instance can be immediately used for testing without restrictions for three hours.

In the email with the download link you will find a fully featured but time-wise limited license that allows you to continue testing for two weeks.

This evaluation license is applied after startup via arangosh like so:

127.0.0.1:8529@_system> db._setLicense("<license-string>");

You will receive a message reporting whether the operation was successful. Please be careful to copy the exact string from the email and to put it in quotes as shown above.

{ "error": false, "code": 201 }

Your license has now been applied.

License renewals

Later renewals and changes to the license are performed in the same way as the initial installation using the arangosh command above. The difference to the initial installation is that there will be no new grace period. An existing license merely expires. It is thus important that one renews the license ahead of time.

Warnings will start reminding the user from one week prior to expiry in the UI, in arangosh and in the log files. Please refer to the monitoring section below for sustained awareness of the license status.

Accidental application of an inferior license to the currently applied, i.e. with earlier expiry, is only possible by overriding this safety mechanism as follows:

127.0.0.1:8529@_system> db._setLicense("<license-string>", {"force": true});

Checking Your License

At any point you may check the current state of your license in arangosh:

127.0.0.1:8529@_system> db._getLicense();

{
  "features": {
    "expires": 1632411828
  },
  "license": "JD4E ... dnDw==",
  "version": 1,
  "status": "good"
  "hash" : "...."
}

The status attribute is the executive summary of your license and can have the following values:

• good: Your license is valid for more than another 1 week.
• expiring: Your license is about to expire shortly. Please contact your ArangoDB sales representative to acquire a new license or extend your old license.
• read-only: Your license has expired at which point the deployment will be in read-only mode. All read operations to the instance will keep functioning. However, no data or data definition changes can be made. Please contact your ArangoDB sales representative immediately.

The attribute expires in features denotes the expiry date as Unix timestamp (in seconds since January 1st, 1970 UTC).

The license field holds an encrypted and base64-encoded version of the applied license for reference and support from ArangoDB.

Monitoring

In order to monitor the remaining validity of the license, the metric arangodb_license_expires is exposed by Coordinators and DB-Servers, see the Metrics API.

Managing Your License

Backups, restores, exports and imports and the license management do not interfere with each other. In other words, the license is not backed up and restored with any of the above mechanisms.

Make sure that you store your license in a safe place, and potentially the email with which you received it, should you require the license key to re-activate a deployment.