Change your Vault license

Enterprise

Appropriate Vault Enterprise license required

Assumptions

You have an available Vault Enterprise license key.
You have admin privileges for your Vault deployment environment.

Vault Enterprise automatically checks the following locations, in order, and stops once it finds a valid license.

Order	Location	Variable / Field
1	Environment variable	`VAULT_LICENSE`
2	Environment variable	`VAULT_LICENSE_PATH`
3	Config file	`license_path`

Even if you place a license in multiple places, Vault only uses the first valid license it finds and ignores the rest.

License location recommendation

A config file approach to licenses may be less disruptive as you can make changes dynamically without the need for a restart. If you use environment variables, changing the value typically requires a restart of the Vault processes or its pods.

To change your current Vault Enterprise license:

Run vault version to confirm the build date of your Vault binary is before the expiry date of your license key. Vault will not start if the applied license is expired.
Access the run environment for your Vault cluster.
Run vault license get to review the features associated with the current license. For example:
Run vault license inspect to verify the new license and review and changes to feature support.
Save the current license key to a backup parameter or file.
Replace the current license key with the new license key.
Call the /sys/config/reload/license endpoint on each standby node for the cluster. Refreshing the license on standby nodes first reduces potential disruptions if you run into problems.
Call the /sys/config/reload/license endpoint on the leader node for the cluster.
Run vault license get on each node or review the unseal logs for each node to verify the new license applied correctly.