How to manage your Consul license

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to demonstrate how to license a Consul Enterprise cluster as well as view information about your license.

Use Case

You may be curious how to apply a new or updated license to your Consul cluster. You may also want to see licensing information for your Cluster, such as how much longer the license is valid or which features your cluster is licensed for.

Procedure

Applying a license

For Consul Enterprise 1.10.0 or greater, a license must be available at the time the agent starts. For server agents this means that they must either have the license_path configuration set or have a license configured in the servers environment with the CONSUL_LICENSE or CONSUL_LICENSE_PATH environment variables. Both the configuration item and the CONSUL_LICENSE_PATH environment variable point to a file containing the license whereas the CONSUL_LICENSE environment variable should contain the license as the value. If multiple variables are set, the following order of precedence applies:

CONSUL_LICENSE environment variable
CONSUL_LICENSE_PATH environment variable
license_path configuration item.

Getting information about your clusters license

If you want to see information about your Consul cluster’s current license you would just use the consul license get command:

$ consul license get
License is valid
License ID: a39628cf-ca4c-02f4-f3fa-0b20e1ae8654
Customer ID: dc7d2863-7c96-d8e3-69cf-f1d43fd82b8b
Expires At: 2020-06-22 06:59:59.999 +0000 UTC
Terminates At: 2020-06-22 06:59:59.999 +0000 UTC
Datacenter: *
Package: premium
Licensed Features:
        Automated Backups
        Automated Upgrades
        Enhanced Read Scalability
        Network Segments
        Redundancy Zone
        Advanced Network Federation

Additional Information

You may also need to supply additional flags to your consul license commands if your cluster is secured with ACLs and TLS. The documentation for the top-level Consul command and its flags, consul license is here.