Add an Enterprise Edition License to Redpanda in Linux

To enable enterprise features for Redpanda Self-Managed, you must have an Enterprise Edition license. This guide outlines how to apply or update an Enterprise Edition license for Redpanda Self-Managed in a Linux environment.

Prerequisites

  • You must have rpk installed and configured to connect to your Redpanda cluster.

  • You must have an Enterprise Edition license. Request a license if you don’t have one already.

Add a new license

Redpanda supports the following ways to apply a new license:

Apply the license using a license file

If you have the license key stored in a file, you can apply it by specifying the file path:

rpk cluster license set --path <path-to-license-file> -X admin.hosts=<admin-api-url>

Replace the following placeholders:

  • <path-to-license-file> with the path to your license file.

  • <admin-api-url> the Redpanda admin host and port

Apply the license using an inline license string

If you want to provide the license string directly, use the following command:

rpk cluster license set <license-string>

If neither the path nor the license string are provided, rpk looks for the license in /etc/redpanda/redpanda.license.

Use Redpanda Console

You can upload a license directly through Redpanda Console.

Verify a license

After adding or updating a license, you can use rpk to verify that the license was set.

rpk cluster license info

This command will display the current license details, including the expiration date. For example:

LICENSE INFORMATION
===================
Organization:      redpanda
Type:              enterprise
Expires:           Oct 24 2027

Update an existing license

To update an existing license, you can use one the following methods:

When a new license is uploaded, enterprise features in Redpanda Self-Managed are unlocked immediately without requiring a cluster restart. However, to unlock enterprise features in Redpanda Console, you must restart the Redpanda Console instance.

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