1.5 The licence behind the limits

Included from Basic tierassets

After this you can: read the licence status, name the limits it imposes on the estate, and know what a refused create looks like.

Before you start — tick each one:

• Lesson 1.1 — Projects, environments, assets — and hosts (opschain learn 1.1)

In the GUI: the Licence panel in the Operations area — the stored documents, tier, limits and renewal state, and where a licence file is applied. Its Online verification panel shows each online-enforcement document's last outcome, last and next check, and Verify now runs a phone-home round immediately — the same round as opschain admin licence verify.

Every node create in lesson 1.2 checked something first: the server's effective entitlements. This lesson shows you where those limits come from, how to read what your server holds, and what the refusal looks like when you hit a ceiling.

1. The evaluation footprint and the Basic tier

A server with no licence document stored runs the built-in evaluation footprint, which never expires. Registering it for the free Basic tier lifts it to the Basic limits:

Entitlement	Evaluation footprint (unregistered)	Basic tier (registered)
Projects	1	1
Environments	1	3
Assets	1	1
Runners	1	3
Runner groups	1	1
Agents	0	0
GitHub integration	—	3 trust policies, 1,000 exchanges and mints a day
Academy (packs:academy)	—	the Foundations track

Both carry the assets, templates, triggers, identity:builtin and packs:common features. packs:common is special: every licence resolution always grants it, so applying an enterprise licence can never revoke the bundled common pack (lesson 2.4).

Registering is one command — it prints what the Basic tier discloses (the country your server connects from, its version, the organisation, country and use case you declare, and a coarse platform profile on each verification), asks you to accept, emails you a token, and applies the licence it receives:

opschain admin licence register --email you@company.example \
  --organisation "Acme" --country AU --use-case evaluation

Until you do, admin licence show carries a registration: line and every refused create names opschain admin licence register first. MintPress asset templates — only applicable to existing MintPress customers and those using the MintPress SDK or the packs:mintpress feature — need the separate packs:mintpress entitlement (opschain docs packs-mintpress). The registered Basic tier is enough for every lesson of this module and the next; a multi-project estate needs a licence applied with opschain admin licence apply.

2. Read what your server holds

opschain admin licence show

You should see the tier, its state, the effective limits and every stored document:

tier:        enterprise
state:       valid
grace days:  30
limits:      projects=unlimited environments=unlimited assets=unlimited runners=unlimited agents=unlimited runner_groups=unlimited
features:    agents, assets, maintenance, packs:change-governance, packs:common, templates, triggers
documents:
  acme-2027.licence   enterprise  expires 2027-06-30   valid   contributing   Acme Corp

show is also where renewal shouts at you — due, REQUIRED or OVERDUE lines appear as expiry approaches, because an expired licence (past its grace window) stops new work, never your data or reads. The Basic tier never expires and shows no renewal line.

opschain admin licence features

feature       granted  gates
agents        yes      fleet agent registration and connection
assets        yes      creating asset nodes (and the template-driven estate model with them)
maintenance   yes      maintenance windows
templates     yes      template authoring
triggers      yes      trigger creation
packs:<name>  per pack using the signed commercial pack <name>
pack entitlements: packs:change-governance, packs:common

features prints the whole feature vocabulary and, against a server, marks which of them your effective licence grants.

3. What a refused create looks like

Estate growth is licence-gated: a node create past the ceiling is refused before anything is written, with a named error that states the limit and the remedy:

opschain nodes create second_project

Error: the basic licence allows 1 project (1 in use) — apply a licence with a higher limit to create more (opschain admin licence apply)

Minting licences, removing documents and the revocation denylist are operator territory — the licensing reference (opschain docs entitlements) covers those.

Check yourself

• Which command prints the tier, the entitlements and the node ceilings your server is running under, and which line on it tells you a renewal is due — or that the server is still unregistered?

What you learned

• A server with no licence runs the evaluation footprint: one project, one environment, one asset, one runner and the bundled common pack; opschain admin licence register lifts it to the Basic tier — three environments, three runners, the GitHub integration and the Academy — in return for the disclosed installation intelligence.
• opschain admin licence show reads the tier, limits, documents and renewal state; features names what each entitlement gates.
• A create past a ceiling is refused by name with the remedy, and an expired licence stops new work but never your data.

Next: this closes the module The estate — back to your track (opschain learn).