license

Nomad Enterprise Licensing

Licensing capabilities were added to Nomad Enterprise v0.12.0. Each server in the cluster must have a license to start. Nomad Enterprise can be downloaded from the releases site.

Click here to set up a demo of Nomad Enterprise or here for instructions on how to get a trial license.

Note: A Nomad Enterprise cluster cannot be downgraded to the open source version of Nomad. Servers running the open source version of Nomad will panic if they are joined to a Nomad Enterprise cluster, due to raft entries relating to Enterprise features not being parseable by open source Nomad.

Expiring Licenses

Nomad Enterprise licenses have an expiration time. You can read and validate the license on a running server, on disk, or in your environment with the nomad license commands.

Before upgrading Nomad or replacing your license with a new one, you should always run nomad license inspect to ensure the license is valid with your server binary.

As a Nomad Enterprise license approaches its expiration time, Nomad servers will periodically log a warning message about the approaching expiration. Below shows log excerpts of the warnings.

    2021-03-29T15:02:28.100-0400 [WARN]  nomad.licensing: license expiring: time_left=5m0s
    2021-03-29T15:03:28.103-0400 [WARN]  nomad.licensing: license expiring: time_left=4m0s
    2021-03-29T15:04:28.106-0400 [WARN]  nomad.licensing: license expiring: time_left=3m0s
    2021-03-29T15:05:28.109-0400 [WARN]  nomad.licensing: license expiring: time_left=2m0s
    2021-03-29T15:06:28.112-0400 [WARN]  nomad.licensing: license expiring: time_left=1m0s
    2021-03-29T15:07:28.114-0400 [WARN]  nomad.licensing: license expiring: time_left=0s
    2021-03-29T15:07:58.104-0400 [ERROR] nomad.licensing: license expired, please update license: error="invalid license or license is expired"

When the license expires, enterprise functionality will become limited. Only read operations on enterprise endpoints will be supported, and write operations will return an error.

Configuring the License

See the server license configuration reference documentation on all the options to set an enterprise license. Nomad will load the license file from disk or environment when it starts.

Note: An Enterprise license tutorial is available to help you install the license on the server.

In order to immediately alert operators of a bad configuration setting, if a license configuration option is an invalid or expired license, the Nomad server will exit with an error.

NOMAD_LICENSE=misconfigured nomad agent -dev
==> No configuration files loaded
==> Starting Nomad agent...
==> Error starting agent: server setup failed: failed to initialize enterprise licensing: a file license was configured but the license is invalid: error decoding version: expected integer

See the License commands for more information on interacting with the Enterprise License.