Keygen
Software licensing and distribution API.
Actively maintained with regular releases.
Commit activity more than 60% of tracked projects; popularity more than 43%. How this is calculated.
Commits, last 11 months
| Stars | 1.6k |
|---|---|
| Latest release | v1.7.0 · 23 Jun 2026 |
| Repo updated | 21 Sept 2026 |
| Licence | ⊘ Proprietary |
| Built with | Ruby |
Is Keygen actively maintained?
Keygen is under active development: 418 commits landed over the last 11 months, averaging roughly 27 commits a month in the most recent quarter.
The most recent tagged release, v1.7.0, is about 3 months old.
Of the 77 projects we track in Miscellaneous, Keygen ranks #19 by health score — in the top quarter of its category.
What Keygen actually does
Keygen provides a backend application programming interface designed to handle software licensing and binary distribution. It allows developers to manage product keys, entitlements, and updates programmatically via web requests. The codebase is written in Ruby and is distributed under a proprietary source-available model.
Best fit: It suits development teams who need a self-hosted licensing infrastructure to control software access without relying on third-party cloud services.
Worth knowing: The proprietary licence restricts how you can modify and redistribute the code, and you will need to evaluate the long-term maintenance overhead of running a steady-state project with moderate activity.
Deployment notes
As a Ruby application, it typically requires a persistent relational database, a process manager like Puma or Unicorn behind a reverse proxy for TLS termination, and secure storage for release binaries.
Links
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