Keygen is a fair source 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.

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.

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 Fair Source software and getting a great service!

Keygen is a fair source 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.

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.

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.

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.

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)"

To install dependencies, run:

bundle

To setup Keygen, run:

bundle exec rails keygen:setup

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

bundle exec rails db:seed:development

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

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/actions/validations.feature:369]
bundle exec rake test:cucumber[features/api/v1/licenses/actions/validations.feature]
bundle exec rake test:cucumber[features/api/v1/licenses]

To run Rspec specs, run:

bundle exec rake test:rspec
bundle exec rake test:rspec[spec/models/license_spec.rb:199]
bundle exec rake test:rspec[spec/models/license_spec.rb]
bundle exec rake test:rspec[spec/models]

Keygen is licensed under the Fair Core License. The Fair Core License, or FCL, provides the best balance between user freedom and developer sustainability for a project like Keygen that monetizes via SaaS and self-hosting. The FCL is a mostly-permissive non-compete Fair Source license that eventually contributes to Open Source after 2 years.

The 2-year timeframe applies to each software version made available, whether through pushing a Git commit, tagging a release on GitHub, or publishing an image to Docker Hub. After 2 years, the code licensed under the FCL becomes Open Source under the Apache 2.0 license.

To obtain an Open Source version of Keygen, run the following:

git clone https://github.com/keygen-sh/keygen-api && cd keygen-api
git checkout `git rev-list -n 1 --before='2 years ago' master`

If the LICENSE.md file is FCL, and that code is 2 years old, you may use that version under the Open Source terms of the change license, which is currently the Apache 2.0 license.

You can...

1. self-host Keygen EE to license your enterprise applications.
2. embed Keygen CE in your on-premise applications.
3. run Keygen CE on a private network.
4. modify Keygen to add additional functionality.
5. fork Keygen into a private repo.

If the FCL happens to not work for your company or use-case, please reach out.

The license is available here.

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.

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.

Yes.