Licence valid from a set start date

[willnSSL]

Is it possible to set a licence to be valid from a particular date? Instead of being valid starting on creation, or allowing the user to set the start date, via 'on first validation', is it possible to define, when we create or update the licence, a date in the future that the licence will be valid from?

Thanks!

[ezekg]

Yes. You can set a FROM_FIRST_VALIDATION expiration basis: https://keygen.sh/docs/api/policies/#policies-object-attrs-expirationBasis. Or to set an arbitrary future date, just use addition to add your time delta to the license expiry during creation:

{
  "data": {
    "type": "license",
    "attributes": {
      "expiry": "my-custom-date"
    }
  }
}

Or just wait and create the license just-in-time.

[willnSSL]

I'm not sure I understand correctly - With FROM_FIRST_VALIDATION, is the user not free to start the licence whenever they please? Is there any way to prevent validation until the start date?

[ezekg]

No. Can you explain your use case in more detail? I've never heard of a use case before where you distribute a license key to a user but they aren't allowed to use it until some arbitrary date in the future.

[willnSSL]

Sometimes customers want to enable particular licenced features on a short-term basis for particular events in advance and they want to avoid accidentally starting the timer on these licences ahead of time. With specified start dates they can just load all the licences for a year onto the machines in question, and the capabilities will expand as needed for their planned events.

Having short-term licences that they are responsible for managing the start times of is probably the next best thing though!

[ezekg]

Since this is such a niche use-case, I'd suggest adding a notValidUntil key into the license's metadata and validating the start date at the application level by looking at data.attributes.metadata.notValidUntil.

[willnSSL]

Oh that's a good idea, thanks!