Licensing and Activation

A licence unlocks the paid commands on the commercial build. Activate it once on a machine, or pass the key for a single run. Without a valid licence those commands exit 4 and tell you which edition they need.

Open-source commands (migrate, info, validate, undo, …) never need a licence.

Activate

dblift license activate <your-license-key>

That stores the key in ~/.dblift/license.key so later commands pick it up. Confirm what you have:

dblift license info

You should see the edition (Pro or Enterprise) and the expiry.

Use the key without writing a file

Useful in CI, containers, and short-lived agents:

export DBLIFT_LICENSE_KEY="<your-license-key>"
dblift license check
dblift validate-sql

Or for one invocation only:

dblift --license-key "<your-license-key>" validate-sql

Precedence is --license-key → DBLIFT_LICENSE_KEY → ~/.dblift/license.key.

Check before a paid command

license check exits 0 when the key is present, valid and not expired. Use it as a pipeline gate:

dblift license check
dblift plan --format text,html --output-dir dblift-reports

A missing, invalid or expired key fails the check. Paid commands fail the same way if you skip the check:

$ dblift diff
'diff' is a dblift Pro command and is not included in the open-source edition.
  Compare applied migrations against live database schema (drift detection).
Learn more and upgrade: https://dblift.com/upgrade
$ echo $?
4

Exit 4 means a licence is required — not that a migration failed. Treat it separately in CI.

Remove the stored key

dblift license deactivate

That deletes ~/.dblift/license.key. Environment variables and --license-key are unchanged.

Which commands need a licence

license itself is how you manage the key on the commercial build. See Editions & tiers for what each edition adds, and dblift license for flags.