Keygen

Keygen is an open, source-available software licensing and distribution API, built for developers, by developers. Use Keygen to add license key validation, entitlements, and device activation to your business's desktop apps, server applications, on-premise software, and other products.

Software licensing for everyone

Keygen comes in two editions. Keygen CE is our Community Edition, and is free (as in beer) to self-host for personal and commercial use. Keygen EE is our Enterprise Edition, and it requires a license key to use. Keygen EE comes with dedicated support, as well as enterprise-grade features like request logs, audit logs, permissions, environments, and more.

I built Keygen to make software licensing accessible to everyone.

Managed hosting with Keygen Cloud

The easiest way to get started with Keygen is with our official managed service in the cloud. We'll handle the hard stuff — high availability, backups, security, and maintenance — while you focus on product.

Our managed hosting can save a substantial amount of developer time and resources. For most businesses, this ends up being the best value option and the revenue goes to funding the maintenance and further development of Keygen. So you’ll be supporting open source software and getting a great service!

Self hosting with Keygen CE

Keygen is an open, source-available software licensing and distribution API, and we have a free (as in beer) self-hosted solution. Keygen Community Edition is exactly the same code base as our managed solution, Keygen Cloud, but with a less frequent release schedule (think of it as an LTS release).

Bug fixes and new features are released to Keygen Cloud several times per week. Features are battle-tested in Keygen Cloud which allows us to fix any bugs before the general self-hosted release. Every 6 months, we combine all the changes into a new self-hosted release.

Keygen CE does lack a few features from Keygen Cloud, which are available in Keygen EE.

Interested in self-hosting Keygen? Take a look at our self-hosting docs.

Self hosting with Keygen EE

Keygen is also enterprise-grade, battle-tested in Keygen Cloud with some of the best brands in the world. The following features are available in Keygen Enterprise Edition:

• Request logs: keep a historical record of API requests, along with who made the request, the request body, response body, status code, IP address, and other information.
• Event logs: keep an audit trail of every single event that happens on a Keygen account.
• Environments: manage separate environments within a Keygen account, from test environments, to a sandbox, to QA, to production.
• Permissions: enterprise-grade roles and permissions.
• SSO/SAML: support for SSO/SAML coming soon.

Keygen uses Keygen EE in production to run Keygen Cloud, which is used to license Keygen EE. It's turtles Keygens all the way down (we love dogfooding our own products).

To obtain a license key, please reach out.

Sustainability

Our only sources of funding for Keygen is our premium, managed service for running Keygen in the Cloud, and Keygen EE. But if you're looking for an alternative way to support the project, we've put together some sponsorship options.

If you choose to self-host Keygen CE, you can become a sponsor, which is a great way to give back to the community and to contribute to the long-term sustainability of the project.

Support

Keygen CE is a community supported project and there are no guarantees that you will receive support from the creators of Keygen to troubleshoot your self-hosting issues. Keygen offers best-effort support for Keygen CE. There is a community-supported Discord server and a forum where you can ask for help with self-hosting.

If you do need support guantantees, consider becoming a Keygen Cloud customer, or purchasing Keygen EE.

Developing

Secrets

To generate a secret key for the application, run:

export SECRET_KEY_BASE="$(openssl rand -hex 64)"

To generate at-work encryption secrets, run:

export ENCRYPTION_DETERMINISTIC_KEY="$(openssl rand -base64 32)"
export ENCRYPTION_PRIMARY_KEY="$(openssl rand -base64 32)"
export ENCRYPTION_KEY_DERIVATION_SALT="$(openssl rand -base64 32)"

Setup

To install dependencies, run:

bundle

To setup Keygen, run:

bundle exec rails keygen:setup

Seeding

To seed the database with sample data, run (optional):

bundle exec rails db:seed:development

Running

To start the server, run:

bundle exec rails server

To start a worker, run:

bundle exec sidekiq

To start a console, run:

bundle exec rails console

Testing

To setup the test environment, run:

bundle exec rake test:setup

To run the entire test suite, specs and features, run (takes ~20 mins on a 16-core CPU):

bundle exec rake test

To run Cucumber features, run:

bundle exec rake test:cucumber
bundle exec rake test:cucumber[features/api/v1/licenses/create.feature]

To run Rspec specs, run:

bundle exec rake test:rspec
bundle exec rake test:rspec[spec/models/license_spec.rb]

License

Keygen is licensed under the Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2) license because it provides the best balance between freedom and protection. The ELv2 license is a permissive license that allows you to use, modify, and distribute Keygen as long as you follow a few simple rules:

1. You may not provide Keygen's API to others as a managed service. For example, you cannot host Keygen yourself and sell it as a cloud-based licensing service, competing with Keygen Cloud. However, you can sell a product that directly exposes and utilizes Keygen's API, as long as Keygen cannot be used outside of your product for other purposes (such as your customer using an embedded Keygen EE instance to license their product in addition to your product).

2. You may not circumvent the license key functionality or remove/obscure features protected by license keys. For example, our code contains license gates that unlock functionality for Keygen EE. You cannot remove or change the licensing code to, for example, unlock a Keygen EE feature in Keygen CE.

3. You may not alter, remove, or obscure any licensing, copyright, or other notices.

Anything else is fair game. There's no clause that requires you to open source modifications made to Keygen or other derivative works.

You can self-host Keygen EE to license your enterprise application.

You can embed Keygen CE in your on-premise application.

You can run Keygen CE on a private network.

You can fork Keygen into a private repo.

If the ELv2 license doesn't work for your company, please reach out.

The license is available here.

Contributing

If you discover an issue, or are interested in a new feature, please open an issue. If you want to contribute code, feel free to open a pull request. If the PR is substantial, it may be beneficial to open an issue beforehand to discuss.

The CLA is available here.

Security

We take security at Keygen very seriously. We perform annual pen-tests on our code base and infrastructure. In addition, we regularly perform code audits. Our most recent pen-test was performed by Greg Molnar, an OSCP-certified security researcher in the Ruby and Rails community.

If you believe you've found a vulnerability, please see our SECURITY.md file.

Is it any good?

Yes.