Question about Apigee license.txt file

Google Cloud Apigee
1

Hello

We’re using Apigee on-prem, currently version 4.52.02. We were sent a new License-file from our sales-contact because our current license is expiring in the near future. So far, so good.

I had forgotten the exact expiration-date of our CURRENT license, so I tried to look into that. Suggestions I found that that did NOT work:

  • Restarting the edge-management-server and grep-ing the edge-management-server.log for “license”, hoping I would find something like “License file is valid, expiration date is XYZ”
  • Using the Mgmt-API to query the license-expiration date (must have been a LLM hallucinating when i was given that answer)
  • Using the Apigee UI and go to Admin –> License Info (this answer was actually given to me by the Google Chatbot in the Google Cloud Support section)
  • Using a self-written Java-program as described in another post here on the forum (I cannot post the link because “new users can only include 2 links in one post” :slight_smile: )

Since all of this didn’t work, I wanted to do one final test before contacting support: I followed the documentation on how to replace the license file, but placed a license.txt file into /opt/apigee/customer/conf/license.txt with a content of “hello” and restarted the edge-management-server. Surely, I thought, this would create an problem and give me error messages about a corrupt license-file in the log. But no, it didn’t. This had no effect at all, as far as I could tell. My system was still working fine, no errors regarding the license in the log. Just to see if it would make a difference, I used my actual new license file, placed it in /opt/apigee/customer/conf/license.txt and restarted the MS. Still no difference in the logs.

So now I was completely confused and opened a support ticket. We had a chat and a call and here’s the summary I was sent:

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We have two workarounds to update the license file.

  1. We can update in silent config file , “APIGEE LICENSE_PAth=” and we have to rerun the setup command for management server to pick up the new one.
    And this is not much better as if we rerun the setup , the script will rewrite and not good approch for prod servers.
  2. And with the help of this document you can update the license file.
    Replacing the Edge license file  |  Edge for Private Cloud v4.52.02  |  Apigee Docs
    Best and safe approach.
    Next action:
    As you have already followed the workaround 2 so your license file was update to the latest.

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I asked the support-person: “What is even the point of the license.txt if I can place an invalid license.txt into /opt/apigee/customer/conf/, restart the server and it still keeps running fine? They told me that the license-file is actually only checked for validity during the setup-process (meaning: when initially installing the components or when upgrading the components). It is not checked for validity during MS service-restarts. I was astonished to hear that.

So then I asked: “My current license is expiring in one month. Are you telling me I could simply do nothing, forget about the license file and the system will keep running fine without issues as long as I don’t upgrade or re-install?”. And they said yes.

Is this actually true?

2

The license file is checked for validity during the setup-process, ie, when initially installing the components or when upgrading the components. It is not checked for validity during MS service-restarts. Yes, true.

Good luck!

3

Thank you for the answer.

But then I don’t understand what the point is of replacing the license-file and restarting the MS, as described here.