Overview
The reason why this may be necessary since historically Consul has had 2 license versions.
- License Version 1 (v1) is for Consul < 1.6
- License Version 2 (v2) is for Consul 1.6+ onwards. Beware, that v2 licenses will not work with older Consul binaries but v1 licenses do work with newer versions. However it advised to get an updated v2 license from your CSM once you have upgraded to versions 1.6 and above.
- V2 is the current version of licensing and is given out by default for all NEW deployments.
- From Consul 1.10+ent onwards certain licensing changes have been implemented the most notable being that, a Consul Enterprise License is needed to start a Consul Enterprise agent.
How to determine which Consul license version is in use?
The first 2 characters in any generated license will tell you the version of that license. If the license begins with 01 it is version 1 (v1) and if it begins with 02 it is version 2 (v2)
- The following command will display that for you.
echo "License Type is: v$(cat <license_file> | cut -c2)"
The above command will read out if the license is a v1 license or a v2 license.
For example,
> echo "License Type is: v$(cat license.hclic | cut -c2)"
> License Type is: v2
Another helpful tip is using the consul license inspect command.
- Only v2 licenses will return a meaningful output with this command since this command was introduced in Consul 1.10 and onwards, after v2 licenses became mainstream.