Surveyor

Spice License

Applies to:
  • Surveyor IT Pro
  • Surveyor OT Pro

A Spice License lets an air-gapped Surveyor run. Spice Labs issues it to your organization; it names the product and the features it grants, and it expires on a set date. spice checks it on your machine against a key built into the image, offline: the check never contacts a server, and you need no Spice Labs account.

Every command checks the license before it does any work, except spice pass decode, spice config explain, tab completion and --help, which run without one.

Get a license

Spice Labs issues Spice Licenses; contact Spice Labs for one, or for a new one when yours nears its expiry date. You receive it as a single line of text, usually in a file.

Set it

Keep the license in a file with restricted permissions, or in your secrets manager, and load it into the SPICE_LICENSE environment variable from there rather than typing it:

export SPICE_LICENSE=$(cat spicelicense.txt)
$env:SPICE_LICENSE = (Get-Content -Raw .\spicelicense.txt).Trim()

That sets it for the current terminal. To set it for every new terminal, add the same line to your shell’s startup file (such as ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc), or on Windows store it for your user account and open a new PowerShell window:

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("SPICE_LICENSE", (Get-Content -Raw .\spicelicense.txt).Trim(), "User")

The wrapper passes SPICE_LICENSE into the CLI’s container and trims stray spaces and line breaks from it.

Check it

spice --version ends with one line saying whether the license is valid, without running anything:

license: valid until 1 March 2027, 00:00 UTC

When it is not, the line gives the reason, as in license: none (Your Spice License expired on 1 March 2026, 00:00 UTC.).

For the whole license, run spice pass decode. It runs even when the license is not valid, and shows the licensed features (Licensed Features), what it was issued for (Licensed Edition), when it expires (Expires At), any Artifact Cutoff, and a License: line saying whether it is valid for this product.

Renew it

Within 30 days of the expiry date, every run warns you:

⚠️ Your Spice License expires on 1 March 2027, 00:00 UTC; contact Spice Labs for a new one before then.

Ask Spice Labs for a new license before then, and set SPICE_LICENSE to it. After the expiry date, every command except the ones above stops with Your Spice License expired on <date>.

When spice refuses to run

spice stops before doing any work and prints one line saying why, followed by what to do. Every message, and its fix, is in Troubleshooting.