Add a Chef license key

To use Chef products that require a license, you need to add your license key. You can find your license key in the customer support portal.

Products that require a Chef license key

You need a Chef license key to run the following products:

Chef InSpec 6

The following products require a Chef license key to run, depending on the distribution that you install:

Chef InSpec 7 and later
Chef Infra Client 19 and later

For these products, you need a license depending on how you install it:

The Chef Habitat package for these products doesn’t require a license key to run.
The Ruby gem downloaded from RubyGems.org requires a license key to run.

You can’t manually enable or disable licensing. The licensing requirements are determined by the distribution.

Add a license key

Chef products accept a license key through an environment variable or a command line argument. Chef stores license data locally in a configuration file at $HOME/.chef/licenses.yaml.

Use a command line option

To add a license key, use the --chef-license-key command line option:

<CHEF_PRODUCT_COMMAND> --chef-license-key <LICENSE_KEY>

Use an environment variable

To add a license key, set the CHEF_LICENSE_KEY environment variable:

export CHEF_LICENSE_KEY=<LICENSE_KEY>
<CHEF_PRODUCT_COMMAND>