Get a license key

To get a Gloo Gateway Enterprise license key, contact an account representative.

You can also request a trial license key instead. Note that each trial license key is typically valid for 30 days. When the license key expires, you can request a new license key by contacting your account representative or filling out this form.

Provide the license key during installation

To use Gloo Gateway Enterprise, you must provide a license key during the installation process.

Provide key directly

When you install Gloo Mesh Enterprise in your management cluster, you can provide your license key string directly in either of the following ways:

  • Helm: In your Helm values file, provide the license string in the gloo.license_key: $GLOO_GATEWAY_LICENSE_KEY setting.
  • glooctl: In your glooctl install command, include the --license-key=$GLOO_GATEWAY_LICENSE_KEY flag.

After installation completes, a Kubernetes secret is created for you to store the license key.

Provide key in a secret

You can specify your license key by creating a secret before you install Gloo Gateway.

  1. Create a secret with your license key in the gloo-system namespace of your cluster.
      kubectl apply -n gloo-system -f - << EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
type: Opaque
metadata:
  name: license-key
  namespace: gloo-system
data:
  license-key: ""
EOF
  2. When you install Gloo Gateway, specify the secret name and disable default secret generation in your Helm values file or the glooctl install command.
    • Helm: In your Helm values file, provide the secret name as the value for the gloo.license_secret_name field, and set create_license_secret to false.
    • glooctl: In your glooctl install command, include the --set gloo.license_secret_name=<license> and --set create_license_secret=false flags.

Update the license

Before your Gloo Gateway Enterprise license expires, you can update the license by patching the license key secret.

Confirm license expiration

The license key is stored as a Kubernetes secret in the cluster. When the key expires, the pods that mount the secret might crash. For example, if you notice that your Gloo Gateway deployments have new warnings, your license might be expired. You can check the logs for one of the deployments, such as the gloo deployment, to look for an error message similar to the following:

  kubectl logs deploy/gloo -n gloo-system
  
  {"level":"warn","ts":"2024-03-23T18:36:16.282Z","caller":"setup/setup.go:85","msg":"LICENSE WARNING: License expired, please contact support to renew."}

You can confirm that the license key is expired by copying and pasting your current license key into the jwt.io debugger, and checking the expiration date indicated by the exp header.

Replace the expired license

Trial license: If you’re a new user whose trial license has expired, contact your Solo.io account representative to get a new license key, or fill out this form.

Standard license: To update the license key, patch the secret and restart the Gloo Gateway deployments. During the upgrade, the data plane continues to run, but you might not be able to modify the configurations for Gloo custom resources through the management plane.

  1. Save the new license key in an environment variable.

      export GLOO_GATEWAY_LICENSE_KEY=<new-enterprise-key-string>

  2. Update the license secret with the new key.

      kubectl create secret generic --save-config -n gloo-system license --from-literal=license-key=$GLOO_GATEWAY_LICENSE_KEY --dry-run=client -o yaml | kubectl apply -f -

  3. Restart the Gloo Gateway deployment to pick up the license secret changes.

      kubectl -n gloo-system rollout restart deploy/gloo

  4. Verify that the deployment is restarted and no longer in a crashed state.

      kubectl logs deploy/gloo -n gloo-system