A small clarification to use Free Tier Liferay

Community Liferay DXP Free Tier
1

I read in a recent post some conditions about usage of Free Tier version. This is one of most important for me:

  • Each key is tied to a specific domain, or localhost, for local development

What does it mean? If I configured Liferay (now I have a CE version) with different virtual hosts (now I have 7 domains in production), do I need 7 activation keys?

Thx in advance.

Enrico

2

Hi @Enrico_Oliosi,

Thanks for the question.

So, the way the activation key works is that it validates against the Server that is hosting Liferay upon startup. It has nothing to do with any virtual hosts that you define within the platform.

So, if you have 7 domains running on a single Liferay instance (or cluster) you only need 1 activation key, which will need to be tied to the domain of the Liferay server.

Hope that makes sense!

Cheers,

Ben

1 Like
3

Hi,

And if I have many hosting servers but all on the same Domain, but with differents sub-domains ?

Christophe

4

Hey @Christophe_Cariou1 - this isn’t a scenario I’ve had a chance to test. I tested requesting a key with a sub-domain, and I got a new key generated. But my guess is that if you generate a key for the parent domain it will happily activate a server in a sub-domain. I’ll see if I can find out.

It’s worth noting that while we would recommend a separate key for each Server, the same key can be used more than once - it’s not something that gets “used up” by being deployed.

Cheers,

Ben

1 Like
5

Thank you Ben,

as I assist a webinar this morning on “Liferay DXP & the Free Tier” I’ll ask.

I will report any answer here..

Cheers

Christophe

6

Well, I’m the host on that particular webinar Christophe, and unfortunately (for the purposes of getting this question answered) I’m not likely to be joined by anyone else - but I will definitely find out the answer for you!

7

Hi @Christophe_Cariou1,

So, some confirmations for you - and anyone else who is interested:

  • The domain you register to generate the Free Tier Activation Key is only used on startup of the server to check that the OS the server is running on is in that domain.
  • If you generate for the parent domain (e.g. mydomain.com) then this will work on a server configured with that domain and any sub-domain (so, web.mydomain.com, sales.mydomain.com and so on).
  • Each key can be used any number of times, so if it’s easier for you to manage, you can generate one key for the parent domain and use it for all of your servers in any subdomain.
  • There are no restrictions in what purpose the key is used for - you could use the same key for dev, uat, and prod, for example.
  • If you find it easier to just have one key, that’s fine. Equally if you prefer to have a key for each type of server, or each different app, you can do this too.
  • You can also generate keys for sub-domain - so you could generate one for sales.mydomain.com which will work for any server in that sub-domain, or any sub-domain of that (e.g. web.sales.mydomain.com) but will not work for the parent (so it won’t work for mydomain.com) or “sibling” domains (store.mydomain.com)

So, bottom line - easiest path is to register using your parent domain and use this across all servers.

And, to re-iterate, this is just a hardware (or virtual!) test on startup, you can add any number of Sites and/or Virtual Instances, each mapped to any domain you want, on a single Liferay server (or cluster).

Whew! Hope that has not caused more confusion!

Ben

8

Hi Ben and thank you for this clarification !

Cheers

Christophe