Self-hosted licensing

A self-hosted installation needs a license key from MergeHarbor. The key is a signed file (.lic) that the installation checks offline, against public keys built into the release. MergeHarbor is never contacted, so the check works in air-gapped networks.

Without a valid key, reviews are paused. Everything else works: you can sign in, connect code hosts and identity providers, and configure organizations before the key arrives.

What a license contains

Term	Meaning
Customer	Your company and a contact, as recorded by MergeHarbor
Plan	Team, Advanced or Enterprise. The features are the same as the same plan in the cloud.
Add-on features	Extra features beyond the plan, for example single sign-on or SCIM on Team
Seats	Active developers per calendar month across the whole installation (or unlimited)
Quality modes	Which review cost modes organizations may choose
Term	Start and expiry dates, with a grace period (14 days unless agreed otherwise)
Instance binding	Optional. The key works only on one installation.

An active developer is a person whose pull request got a review that month. Each person counts once, however many organizations they are reviewed in. Bots never count. When the seat limit is reached, pull requests from developers not yet counted that month wait until the next month, and the review says why.

Evaluation licenses

To try MergeHarbor on your own infrastructure, ask for an evaluation license. It works like a paid license but runs for at most 45 days and has no grace period: reviews pause when it ends. Installing a paid key resumes them within a minute.

Install a key

1. Save the .lic file on the machine or in the cluster.
2. Point MergeHarbor at it:

   • Docker Compose: copy it to license/mergeharbor.lic in the install directory.

   • Helm: create a Secret from it, then set license.existingSecret:

     kubectl create secret generic mergeharbor-license --from-file=license.lic=./mergeharbor.lic

   • Any other setup: set LICENSE_FILE to the file’s path on the api and worker containers. You can also set LICENSE_KEY to the key text.

3. Open Settings → System status in the console as an instance administrator. It shows the license state, plan, seats used this month and the expiry date.

To check a key before installing it, run mergeharbor license check mergeharbor.lic in the mergeharbor image. Add -instance <id> to check a key bound to one installation.

Renew

MergeHarbor sends a renewed .lic file before the current one expires. Replace the file (or the Secret’s content): the installation picks it up within a minute, without a restart.

To bind a key to one installation, send MergeHarbor the instance id from Settings → System status. A bound key does not work if it is copied to another installation.

Expiry and warnings

State	Reviews	What instance administrators see
Valid	Run	Nothing
Expires within 30 days	Run	An amber banner on every page
Expired, in the grace period	Run	A red banner with the days left
Grace period over, or not yet valid	Paused	A red banner, and each review explains why
No key, or the key is not valid	Paused	A red banner with the reason

When reviews pause, nothing is deleted. History, settings and exports keep working, and installing a valid key resumes reviews within a minute.