Install a license and move to Business

You bought a plan and received a license. This page is what to do with it: where the file goes, how to apply it to a running engine, how to read what is installed, and — if you bought a Business plan — how to swap the Community binary for the commercial one without reinstalling anything.

A license is an attestation, not a runtime switch

It gates no feature in the software you are running. An expired or absent license does not turn functionality off, and no license caps user accounts — self-hosted users are unlimited in every tier. It is a signed statement of what you are entitled to, not a key that unlocks code already on your disk.

What it does gate is ACCESS TO ARTIFACTS, and that distinction is the whole model: a live license is required to download the commercial build and to install from a local bundle (olivares upgrade --bundle), checked offline against the key embedded in your binary. That is why the commercial build is a different binary you fetch with a token rather than a flag flipped in the one you have — and why “it gates nothing” would be the wrong thing to tell you.

What you received

You bought	What arrives	What you do with it
Community	nothing to install	already running — nothing on this page applies
Business / Business Max, self-hosted	a license file and a download token	install the license, then swap to the enterprise binary
Cloud	credentials for a hosted tenant	nothing to install on a host of yours

The license is a single signed blob. Save it as a file — customer.license, any name — and keep the download token from the same email: they are used at different steps and only the license is installed.

1 · Install the license

olivares license install ./customer.license --data-dir /var/lib/olivares

The command verifies the blob before it writes anything, against the Ed25519 public key embedded in your build, so a truncated copy-paste fails here rather than at the next boot. On success it writes <data-dir>/license.key with mode 0600 — the canonical at-rest license the engine reads by default.

Pass - instead of a path to read the blob from standard input:

pbpaste | olivares license install - --data-dir /var/lib/olivares

Installing over an existing license replaces it, atomically, and prints which one it replaced.

Apply it to a running engine — no restart

A running engine picks the new license up in place. Any one of these does it:

kill -HUP "$(pidof olivares)"                 # signal the running process
curl -X POST .../v1/console/runtime/reload    # the API half

…or the console’s own reload control. Restarting also works; it is just not necessary.

Where the engine looks, in order

If you already inject the license some other way, know that the data-dir file is the lowest of four sources. The engine resolves, highest first:

1. --license <path> (or LicenseFile in the config file)
2. OLIVARES_LICENSE_PATH=<path>
3. OLIVARES_LICENSE=<blob> — the license inline in the environment
4. <data-dir>/license.key — what license install writes

license install refuses when it can see that an override outranks the file it is about to write: installing under one would leave a file the engine never reads, and you would see exit 0 and no change. It says which override it found, and --force stages the file anyway — the legitimate case being an override you are about to remove.

What that refusal can and cannot see

It reads OLIVARES_LICENSE_PATH and OLIVARES_LICENSE from its own environment. It cannot see a --license flag (or a LicenseFile config entry) given to an engine that is already running as a separate process — install and uninstall do not take a --license flag at all. So on a host where the service was started with an explicit path, both commands can succeed while changing nothing the engine reads.

Run olivares license status after either one. It resolves by the same precedence the engine uses and tells you which source is actually in effect, which is the question that matters.

2 · Check what is installed

olivares license status --data-dir /var/lib/olivares

status is offline and resolves the license by the same precedence the engine uses, so it answers the question that matters — which license is actually in effect — rather than “is there a file”. It reports the source it resolved, the holder, the plan and the expiry.

Run it after every install, and after removing an override.

3 · Community → Business, in place

With a license installed, the commercial binary is a download away. Nothing is reinstalled and no data moves:

olivares upgrade --enterprise --token <TOKEN>

Why the flag says --enterprise when the edition is Business

The flag names the artifact channel — the gated download — not the edition you bought. It is --enterprise in the binary you already have (cmd/olivares/cmd_upgrade.go), so this page prints it exactly as you must type it. The editions themselves are Community and Business, with the four business add-ons named in LICENSING.md: Regulated Operations, AI Runtime Security, Compliance Packs, and Identity & Scale.

It fetches the signed commercial build for your platform, verifies the signature offline — a tampered artifact aborts the upgrade with the running binary untouched — and swaps it in atomically, keeping a backup of the previous one. --check first if you want to see the plan without taking it:

olivares upgrade --enterprise --token <TOKEN> --check

Restart the service, and then turn the add-ons on:

olivares enterprise enable <preset>     # starter | regulated | full

Activation is governed and audited: it shows you a diff first, and stages any add-on that needs a secret or a review rather than half-enabling it. olivares enterprise status reports what is active. These commands exist only in the commercial binary — if olivares enterprise is not a command, you are still running the Community build and the swap above has not happened yet.

Back up before the swap

The swap replaces a binary, not your data — but take the backup anyway, the same one Upgrade and roll back asks for. That page also covers going back to the previous binary.

Removing a license

olivares license uninstall --data-dir /var/lib/olivares --yes

It deletes <data-dir>/license.key and reports what it removed. Like install, it refuses while it can see an OLIVARES_LICENSE* override — the file is not what is in effect, so removing it would change nothing — and with the same blind spot: a flag passed to a separately running engine is invisible to it. This is the offline half of the console’s own DELETE /v1/console/license.

Removing the license does not disable anything you were running. It withdraws the attestation; the commercial binary keeps behaving as the commercial binary until you swap it back.

What is not on this page

• Issuing licenses (license keygen / sign) is the vendor side of the same command. You do not need it as a customer.
• What each plan contains lives in the pricing pages, not here.
• How the model works — why a subscription is access to artifacts rather than a switch — is Open core and licensing.