Reticle Docs: verification for AI coding agents

If your organisation has a Reticle license key, this page is everything you need to put it in place. There is no account to create, no login, and no call with us required. Do not have a key? Write to hey@reticle.sh.

One key per organisation

A key covers your whole organisation. Every developer and every machine uses the same one, so share it the way you would share any other build-time credential: your secrets manager, your onboarding doc, your CI configuration.

Set it

Reticle reads one environment variable, RETICLE_LICENSE_KEY. Set it everywhere Reticle runs, which is usually more than one place.

# In ~/.zshrc, ~/.bashrc, or your team's equivalent.
export RETICLE_LICENSE_KEY="your-key-here"

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('RETICLE_LICENSE_KEY', 'your-key-here', 'User')

env:
  RETICLE_LICENSE_KEY: ${{ secrets.RETICLE_LICENSE_KEY }}

docker run -e RETICLE_LICENSE_KEY="your-key-here" your-image

An export only affects shells started after it, so open a new terminal or source your profile.

Editors and agents that launch Reticle themselves

This is the step teams most often miss. Claude Desktop, Cursor and similar tools launch from the desktop rather than from a terminal, so they never read your shell profile. An export that plainly works in your terminal is invisible to them, and Reticle reports itself unlicensed.

Put the key in the MCP server’s own env block instead, then restart the editor. Configuration is read at startup.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "reticle": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["@reticlehq/server", "mcp"],
      "env": {
        "RETICLE_LICENSE_KEY": "your-key-here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Confirm it worked

npx @reticlehq/server license

You do not need NODE_ENV set, a project, a dev server, or a running app. This reads the key and nothing else.

`status`	What it means	What to do
`active`	Valid and in date.	Nothing. You are done.
`missing`	Reticle found no key in its environment.	The variable is not visible to this process. See below.
`expired`	The key was valid and its term has ended.	Contact us to renew.
`invalid`	The key was not accepted.	Usually a copy or paste problem. See below.
`eval`	This build has no licensing configured.	You are on a build older than licensing. Update.

Over time

Your key carries an expiry, shown in the license output. A renewal is a new key for the same organisation: replace the value everywhere you set it, and nothing else changes. Nothing breaks without warning. An expired key reports expired rather than failing silently, and you can check at any time with the command above. Activation is offline. Reticle verifies your key cryptographically on your own machine, so there is no license server to reach. It works behind a firewall, on an air-gapped machine, and during any outage on our side.

When it does not work

It says missing, but the variable is definitely set

The commonest cause by a distance is that Reticle is being launched by something that does not inherit your shell environment: an editor, a desktop agent, a systemd unit, a container. Run echo $RETICLE_LICENSE_KEY in the same context Reticle runs in, not just in your own terminal. If an editor launches it, use the MCP env block above.Second commonest: the variable was set in a shell that was already open. Environment variables are read when a process starts, so open a new terminal and restart anything long-running.

It says invalid

The key changed between us sending it and Reticle reading it. Almost always one of:

truncated, most often by a line wrap when pasted into a config file or a chat client
a character dropped or added while copying by hand
quoted in a way that swallowed a character

Surrounding whitespace and a trailing newline are tolerated, so neither is the cause. Copy the key again in one piece. If it still reports invalid, write to us and we will re-issue it.

command not found: reticle

Use the npx @reticlehq/server ... form shown on this page. It runs without a global install, and it is the form we support.

What a licensed deployment reports

Stated plainly, because a security review will ask. Activation itself makes no network request. Your key is verified on your machine with public key cryptography. Separately, Reticle sends anonymous usage metrics, as it does for every user. On a licensed deployment these carry your license id, an opaque identifier that means nothing without our own records, so we can tell your organisation’s usage apart from everyone else’s and know when to talk to you about renewal. Never sent, licensed or not: your source code, your application’s data, your users’ data, URLs, selectors, page content, file contents, or your organisation’s name. The kill switch has no exception for licensed installations:

export RETICLE_TELEMETRY=0

DO_NOT_TRACK=1 is honoured identically. If your policy forbids outbound telemetry, set it. Your activation is unaffected, because activation never needed the network. To keep your own usage data without sending it, RETICLE_TELEMETRY_FILE=/path/to/file.jsonl records the same stream locally and sends nothing.

Getting help

hey@reticle.sh for activation problems, renewals and re-issues. Include the output of npx @reticlehq/server license. It carries your license id and no secrets, and it usually tells us the answer immediately.

How it works

Compare

Practice

Trust & licensing

Activating a license key

One key per organisation

Set it

Editors and agents that launch Reticle themselves

Confirm it worked

Over time

When it does not work

What a licensed deployment reports

Getting help

​One key per organisation

​Set it

​Editors and agents that launch Reticle themselves

​Confirm it worked

​Over time

​When it does not work

​What a licensed deployment reports

​Getting help

One key per organisation

Set it

Editors and agents that launch Reticle themselves

Confirm it worked

Over time

When it does not work

What a licensed deployment reports

Getting help