Documentation

Licensing

Any add-on intended for sale on the Atlassian Marketplace needs to be license-enabled. Add-ons work with the atlassian application to apply licensing requirements.

The Atlassian application reports the licensing status of the instance to the plugin in each request.

The add-on should:

  • check the license status in service requests it receives from the Atlassian application
  • implement the logic appropriate for the given license status. For instance, for an expired license, the add-on may choose to disable its features, enter a read-only state, or function in some other restricted manner that makes sense

Development Considerations

In a nutshell, to implement licensing for Atlassian Connect, you need to:

  • set the enableLicensing flag in the add-on descriptor for the add-on
  • write code to check the lic URL parameter for all incoming requests
  • use a REST resource at /rest/atlassian-connect/1/license to get additional license information for each application
  • implement the logic appropriate for the add-on based on the license status

Note:

The result of a license check by the Atlassian application is cached for 5 minutes.

Setting the License-Enabled Flag

To implement licensing in an add-on, set the licensing enabled flag in the plugin descriptor to true. Any add-on intended for sale should have this flag enabled.

The licensing enabled flag appears in the descriptor file atlassian-connect.json

{
    "name": "Hello World",
    "key": "hello-world",
    "description": "Atlassian Connect add-on",
    "baseUrl": "http://www.example.com",
    "enableLicensing": true
}

This tells UPM to check and report licensing status to the plugin. On the other hand, if you are using a plugin strictly for internal use or you plan to distribute it freely on the Marketplace, this should be set to false.

Handling Requests with the License Status

Each incoming request from the Atlassian application instance includes a query parameter named lic. For example:

http://....?lic=active

Your add-on should check this value to determine the license status of the instance associated with the current request. The lic parameter may have one of three values:

  • active – the license is valid for this instance and add-on
  • expired – a license is present, but it is expired
  • none – no license is present

Accessing License Details

In addition to the lic parameter, an add-on can use a REST API resource to get an instance's license for this plugin. Note, you will need to declare READ scope in order to use this resource.

The license resource is exposed as a REST resource at this URL:

https://{HOSTNAME}:{PORT}/{CONTEXT}/rest/atlassian-connect/latest/license

Among other information, the plugin can use the resource to discover:

  • whether the plugin license for an instance is valid
  • the organisation name, SEN and contact email associated with the license
  • the number of users allowed by the current license
  • the expiration date of the license
  • license type, such as commercial or academic

Testing license enforcement

You can test licensing-related behavior of your add-on in a local, development environment to an extent. But there's no way to replicate the interaction with the UPM and Atlassian Marketplace in a local environment alone. In the production environment, the Atlassian Marketplace serves licenses for new subscribers, and the application interacts with the Marketplace to get the license state.