Licensing
Miabi Enterprise is unlocked by a signed license key. The key is verified offline, with no phone-home — your instance never contacts a licensing server to validate or renew.
How the key works
Each license key is cryptographically signed. The Miabi binary embeds the matching public key, and at startup it verifies the signature locally:
- If the signature is valid, the entitlements encoded in the key (such as node count and feature flags) are unlocked.
- If the key is missing, malformed, or its signature doesn't verify, Enterprise features stay locked.
Because verification is purely cryptographic and local, Miabi works the same in air-gapped and offline environments as it does on a connected server. There is no usage reporting and no outbound license traffic.
Offline verification means you stay in control of your data and your network. The trade-off is that license changes are applied by installing a new key, not by an automatic refresh.
Community deny-all stub vs Enterprise build
The edition you run determines whether a license key even applies:
| Build | Command | Behavior |
|---|---|---|
| Community | make build | Links a deny-all stub for Enterprise features. A license key has nothing to unlock — the features aren't compiled in. |
| Enterprise | make build-ee | Compiles Enterprise features behind the enterprise build tag, locked until a valid signed key unlocks them at runtime. |
So unlocking Enterprise requires both the Enterprise build and a valid license key. See Community vs Enterprise for the full feature matrix.
You usually don't build this yourself. The official miabi/miabi images and release binaries are already the Enterprise build (dormant until licensed), so you only need to install a key. A pure Community build — zero enterprise code — is produced only by building from source with make build; there is no published Community image.
Activating a license
To activate Enterprise:
- Run an Enterprise-capable build of Miabi. The official
miabi/miabiimages and release binaries already are — if you build from source instead, usemake build-ee. - As a platform admin, open the licensing screen in the web console.
- Provide the signed license key to the instance.
Miabi verifies the signature offline and unlocks the entitlements immediately — no restart or network call required. The console then reflects your active edition and the features the key grants.
Keep your license key somewhere safe alongside your other operational secrets. You'll need it again if you rebuild or migrate the instance.
Where to go next
- Community vs Enterprise — what each edition includes.
- Platform Admin — the account that activates the license.