PrimeUI License

The Workbench frontend is built on Cratis Components, which in turn builds on PrimeReact. From version 11, PrimeReact is PrimeTek’s commercially licensed PrimeUI rather than the MIT-licensed library version 10 was. It verifies a license key when its provider mounts, and without one it logs a warning and renders an “Invalid PrimeUI License” banner over the application — in development and production alike, whatever the styling configuration.

Cratis is open source and qualifies for the free Community tier. The terms and the eligibility rules are at primeui.dev/licenses/community.

Contributing without a key

You do not need a license key to contribute. Everything builds, every spec runs, and the Workbench is fully usable — the banner is the only difference. Pull requests from forks build without one, because GitHub does not expose repository secrets to fork builds.

The banner is deliberately not suppressed. Hiding it would make a licensing problem invisible rather than absent, and an unlicensed build is exactly the thing a contributor should be able to see at a glance.

Supplying a key

The key is read from the environment as PRIMEUI_LICENSE. It is configuration, not source: it differs between machines and builds, and it must never be committed.

Vite reads the process environment as well as .env files, so either of these works:

# A shell profile - one export serves every Cratis application on the machine
export PRIMEUI_LICENSE=your-key-here

# Or per-repository, in Source/Workbench/.env (git-ignored; see .env.example)
PRIMEUI_LICENSE=your-key-here

The variable keeps PrimeTek’s own name rather than a Chronicle-specific one, so a single value covers this repository, Studio, and any other Cratis application you have checked out. Source/Workbench/.frontend exposes both the CHRONICLE_ and PRIMEUI_ prefixes to the bundle for exactly this reason.

Restart the dev server after setting it — Vite reads the environment at startup.

How it reaches the application

Piece	Role
vite.config.ts	Exposes the PRIMEUI_ prefix alongside CHRONICLE_
primeUiLicense.ts	The single accessor; resolves an empty value to undefined
index.tsx	Passes it to CratisComponentsProvider
.storybook/preview.tsx	The same, so Storybook renders unbannered too
vite-env.d.ts	Types it, so it is discoverable rather than a magic string

Continuous integration

Both the pull-request build and the release build pass the key from a repository secret, also named PRIMEUI_LICENSE. Because the environment variable and the secret share a name, no per-workflow translation is involved:

env:
    PRIMEUI_LICENSE: ${{ secrets.PRIMEUI_LICENSE }}

It is set in workbench-build.yml and publish.yml. A fork’s pull request builds with it unset, which is a supported outcome rather than a failure.