License

Perforce Swarm is free to use with an unlicensed Perforce service. An unlicensed Perforce service provides unlimited use for up to 20 users and 20 workspaces. When the user or workspace limit is crossed, the Perforce service imposes a maximum of 1,000 files. Swarm honors the restrictions of the Perforce service.

With a licensed Perforce service, a Swarm license is required. Without a Swarm license, Swarm's functionality is not restricted in any way, however a license violation notification appears for every page. Contact Perforce to purchase a license or start a free trial.

License file

A Swarm license is a text file called swarm-license that should be copied to data/swarm-license within the Swarm installation folder. The swarm-license file can be added or updated at any time.

Swarm's About dialog identifies whether Swarm is licensed or not:

About Swarm dialog indicating unlicensed use About Swarm dialog indicating licensed use

Note

For OVA installations, the Swarm license file should be copied to /opt/swarm/data/swarm-license.

Limitations

License violation notification

License violation notifications can occur in the following situations:

  • The license file is not found and the Perforce service is licensed

  • The license file is corrupted in some way

  • The license has expired

  • The license applies to a different Swarm release

  • The license specifies fewer Swarm users

When displayed, license violation notifications include a note regarding each type of violation.

Swarm group

When Swarm is used with a licensed Perforce service and the Swarm license has a lower user limit than the Perforce service, Swarm attempts to create a group in the Perforce service called swarm. Users who belong to this group, or a sub-group, are allowed to log in. All other users attempting to log into Swarm are presented with the error: 

Your account is not licensed to use Swarm.

Automatic creation of the swarm group is possible when Swarm is running against Perforce Server 2012.1 or higher, or when Swarm is running as a user with super privileges (which we recommend against). Should the group creation not be possible for any reason, Swarm behaves as if auto-join is disabled.

Warning!

If you create the swarm group outside of Swarm, Swarm's admin-level user must be an owner of the swarm group for auto-join to work.

Since group membership can be managed by a Perforce user with admin or super privileges, it is possible for more users to belong to the swarm group than are permitted. When this occurs, all group members are able to log in and use Swarm, but each user is shown a persistent license violation notification.

Note

The owner of a group is not counted as a member of the group, unless the owner's userid is listed as a user in the group.

Auto-join

When the swarm group is required and is not already at capacity, Swarm attempts to add non-member users to the group when they log in. This can be disabled by adding the following security block to the data/config.php file: 

<?php
    // this block should be a peer of 'p4'
    'security'  => array(
        'disable_autojoin'  => true, // defaults to false
    ),

Note

Auto-join does not work with versions of the Perforce Server prior to 2012.1. When it does not work, users who are not in the swarm group cannot log in until a Perforce service administrator manually adds those users to the swarm group.