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System Locked and Floating License Setup

System Locked and Floating licenses are advanced licensing setup options, often required for installations of LightBurn in shared spaces such as school computer labs.

A System Locked license is locked to the computer it is activated on, allowing all users on the same computer to use the same license without sharing login info. Any LightBurn key can be set up as System Locked.

A Floating license is managed by our license server, allowing the license to be allocated when a LightBurn session is started and released when the session is closed. This is intended for environments such as school computer labs where a greater number of computers will need to be activated than instances of LightBurn will be used at once. Your key must be specially tagged as a Floating type in order to utilize this setup option.

See our Educational and Volume Licensing calculator or contact us via email if you would like to learn more about volume licensing options.

System Locked License Setup

Windows

  1. Make sure LightBurn is installed and activated as normal, then close out of the program, or the rest of the process will not work.

  2. Open up a Command Prompt window:

    1. Click the Start menu, then type "CMD".
    2. Windows will automatically find the Command Prompt app as the best match. Right-click it and select Run as administrator.

  3. Type the following into the command prompt:

    CD “c:\program files\LightBurn”

  4. Next, type the following into the command prompt:

    LightBurn -l (license key code here)

Note

Enter a lowercase letter L, and not the number 1. Enter your key, without the parentheses, where it says "(license key code here)".

Mac

  1. Make sure LightBurn is installed and activated as normal, then close out of the program, or the rest of the process will not work.

  2. Open up a Terminal window.

    1. Press ⌘ + Space then type "Terminal".
    2. Click Terminal to open it.

  3. Type the following:

    cd /Applications/LightBurn.app/Contents/MacOS

sudo ./LightBurn -l (license key code here)

Note

Enter a lowercase letter L, and not the number 1. Enter your key, without the parentheses, where it says "(license key code here)".

Once you've completed this process, all users on the same computer will be able to use LightBurn without activating the key individually.

Floating License Setup

Activation

In order to set up a Floating license, first follow the above instructions on setting up a System Locked license.

Tip

Once you've run the command line process successfully on one system, you can copy the "lightburn.ldata" file from the LightBurn program folder on that system to the same location on other systems you want to use the license, so you can avoid having to type the command line on the rest.

Network Restrictions

LightBurn will need to maintain a constant connection with the external license server to verify licenses. If you are experiencing difficulties with a license not being verified, your network may be restricting LightBurn's access.

To ensure LightBurn can contact the license server, whitelist api.cryptlex.com for port 443.

It is also possible to configure LightBurn to access the network through a proxy. You can append the proxy connection address using -p ProxyString.

The proxy format is:

[protocol://][username:password@]machine[:port]

Examples of valid proxy strings:

http://127.0.0.1:8000/
http://user:[email protected]:8000/
socks5://127.0.0.1:8000/

Troubleshooting

The most common error we see in this process is not running an admin command shell — if you just run it in user mode, it doesn't have permission to create a file in the Program Files folder.

  • On Windows, make sure to right-click and select Run as administrator when opening the Command Prompt app.
  • On MacOS, make sure to include sudo when entering the command to activate the key.

The second most common error we see is mis-entering the license key or command prompt entries. Our instructions show the command line like this:

LightBurn -l (license key code here)

That is "LightBurn", followed by a minus sign and a lower-case letter L, a space, then your license key (without the parentheses around it).

Here is an example entry using a fake key:

LightBurn -l ABCDEF-123456-789012-FDBEA1-2G675A