Documenso
Configuration

Apply Your License Key

Activate your Enterprise license key to unlock enterprise features on your self-hosted instance.

A license key activates the Enterprise features available to your self-hosted instance, such as CSC signing, SSO, embed white-labelling, and 21 CFR Part 11 compliance.

The license key applies to your whole instance, not an individual user account. There's one key per deployment.

Prerequisites

  • An active Enterprise license key — contact sales to set up an Enterprise subscription, then copy your key from license.documenso.com. See Enterprise Edition for details.
  • A running self-hosted Documenso instance that you're able to restart

Step 1: Set the environment variable

Set NEXT_PRIVATE_DOCUMENSO_LICENSE_KEY to your license key.

Add the variable to your .env file (or directly under environment: in compose.yml):

NEXT_PRIVATE_DOCUMENSO_LICENSE_KEY=your-license-key-here

Then apply it:

docker compose up -d
docker run -d \
  --name documenso \
  -e NEXT_PRIVATE_DOCUMENSO_LICENSE_KEY=your-license-key-here \
  documenso/documenso:latest

If you're running Documenso directly (not in a container), add the variable to your .env file:

NEXT_PRIVATE_DOCUMENSO_LICENSE_KEY=your-license-key-here

Step 2: Restart the instance

The license key is only read once, at process startup. Setting the variable in a running container or shell has no effect until the process restarts.

# Docker Compose
docker compose restart documenso

# Docker
docker restart documenso

On startup, Documenso validates the key against the Documenso license server and caches the result locally for future startups, so a brief license-server outage won't lock you out.

What the license enables

A valid license doesn't turn every enterprise feature on everywhere — activation depends on the feature:

  • CSC signing activates instance-wide automatically once the license is active and CSC transport is configured. See CSC / QES Signing for the full setup.
  • SSO, embed white-labelling, 21 CFR Part 11, and similar are provisioned per organisation. Follow each feature's own guide to configure it once the license is active.

Troubleshooting

See Also

On this page

PrerequisitesStep 1: Set the environment variableStep 2: Restart the instanceWhat the license enablesTroubleshootingSee Also