Product Activation

Document Engine is a commercial product, and each installation needs to be activated according to your license. Contact our Sales team for procurement.

License Types

Document Engine offers two types of licenses: online and offline.

Online License

Online licenses rely on an activation key. The first time the Document Engine container is started, it’ll authenticate the key against the PSPDFKit Licensing Service and store the license-related data either in the configured database, or, if the container was started without the database configured, in memory.

Document Engine pings the Licensing Service regularly to verify its license and download updated license information. It also sends anonymous usage analytics to the PSPDFKit Licensing Service. These analytics help us in diagnosing issues and improving the product.

When using an online license, the Document Engine container needs to be able to contact the https://my.pspdfkit.com server.

Offline License

Offline licenses require a license key. Each time the Document Engine container is started, it’ll validate the license key offline and store the license-related data either in the configured database, or, if the container was started without the database configured, in memory.

When using an offline license, Document Engine doesn’t ping the PSPDFKit Licensing Service, nor does it collect any analytics. Any updates to the license must be handled manually, and the Document Engine instance must be restarted.

Configuring the License

For convenience, both online license activation keys and offline license keys can be configured by providing the same ACTIVATION_KEY variable to the Document Engine container environment. Note for versions < 1.2.0: pass your offline license key (AKA demo key) as LICENSE_KEY.

Setting Helm Values

For deployment with Helm, use the values in the documentEngineLicense section:

documentEngineLicense:
  activationKey: "<your activation or license key>"

We recommend using external secrets for the license, e.g. for a secret resource named document-engine-license with an activation key or license key stored as DOCUMENT_ENGINE_ACTIVATION_OR_LICENSE_KEY, use:

documentEngineLicense:
  externalSecret:
    name: document-engine-license
    key: DOCUMENT_ENGINE_ACTIVATION_OR_LICENSE_KEY