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Activating Your Appliance

By the end of this page, you'll know how to activate a KruxOS appliance online with a pairing code, how offline activation works, and how seats behave when you move or re-image an appliance.

Activation never locks you out

Activation is a soft check. An appliance with a missing, expired, or invalid license keeps working — you'll see a banner in the dashboard, not a lockout.

When the appliance asks you to activate — in the first-boot wizard, in Dashboard → Settings → License, or via the admin CLI — it shows an 8-character pairing code.

  1. Go to kruxos.com/activate on any browser (your phone works fine).
  2. Sign in with your email — see Signing In.
  3. Type the 8-character code shown on your appliance and choose the license to use.
  4. The appliance picks up the approval automatically within a few seconds and stores its license key.

The appliance never needs your account credentials — only the pairing code travels between the two.

Offline activation

If the appliance has no internet access, you can activate by pasting the license key directly:

  1. Sign in at kruxos.com and download your license key from your account page.
  2. In Dashboard → Settings → License, choose the offline option and paste the key (the first-boot wizard offers the same path).

Enterprise licenses are activated online only — contact sales if your Enterprise deployment is air-gapped.

Seats — one appliance per seat

Each license activation binds one seat to one appliance. The seat survives reboots and updates — you never re-activate for normal operation.

Moving to a new appliance: a seat is freed only when you explicitly deactivate the old appliance from your account page at kruxos.com. If you activate a new appliance while the seat is still bound, you'll see "This license is already in use" — deactivate the old appliance in your account, then enter the code again (or get an additional key, where your tier allows it).

Re-imaging: a full re-install counts as a new appliance. Deactivate the old seat in your account (before or after re-imaging), then activate the fresh install as normal.

Still stuck?

Contact support with the appliance's pairing code and the email on your account.