Get started with rl-deploy

rl-deploy is a CLI tool created by ReversingLabs to simplify the rl-secure installation process.

It allows for greater flexibility when working with licenses, and makes it easier to deploy rl-secure in ephemeral and cloud infrastructure, CI/CD environments, and containers.

The rl-deploy tool makes it easier to install and use rl-secure in short-lived, temporary environments and on machines that don't have a stable machine number. These types of environments are often called ephemeral environments or ephemeral systems, and they are common in modern CI/CD processes.

The purpose of rl-deploy is to help you integrate rl-secure in your build pipelines and automate security scanning of your build artifacts.

With rl-deploy, you can:

• Use a special, shared identifier called site key together with your license on all machines, instead of generating a separate license for every machine.
• Install rl-secure, activate the license, and optionally configure proxy settings all in one command.

Supported systems and architectures

• rl-secure supports the systems and architectures listed on the System recommendations page.

Download rl-deploy

Current version (25/09/2025)

Current version of rl-deploy is 2.4.5.

You can download and install rl-deploy from any of the sources listed in the following table. SHA-256 checksums for installer packages are included in the table for integrity verification purposes.

Format	Download links	SHA-256 checksum
Python package	Download from PyPI	Available on PyPI
Linux package (RPM)	Direct download	1fad28564585696ed41d329e0b86ee4911c6cd206b17d2d022e7250719c8498b
Linux package (TGZ)	Direct download	0f0d9eb8b3bb9860beca27a1d2ec7708a7680151027871c2bf2c99d6fecf3905
Windows installer (EXE)	Direct download	3c150bf13bea21ba93429808a6bf24d4faa875d60f717bc8df93e15cc829ab1e

The rl-deploy utility does not self-update. If you want to use standalone installation packages, you'll have to download the new versions when they are released.

Users who install rl-deploy from PyPI can get the latest version through pip.

If you already have rl-deploy on your machine, installing the latest version of the tool automatically replaces the existing version.

Who should use rl-deploy?

This guide is for users who want to deploy rl-secure in their CI/CD environments.

After it's installed with rl-deploy, rl-secure works the same way and has the same features as when installed directly.

When there is a new version of rl-secure available, it can automatically update itself (or you can use the rl-secure update command).

Because rl-secure does not use rl-deploy for updates, it's safe to uninstall rl-deploy when you no longer need it.

To learn more about rl-deploy, refer to the Supported rl-deploy commands section in our documentation.

Prerequisites

The following tasks should be completed before you start working with rl-deploy:

1. Install the required Python version. rl-deploy supports Python 3 only.

2. Make sure you have the latest pip version. Use the following command to upgrade pip.

python3 -m pip install -U pip

3. Prepare your system. For example, if you want to try installing rl-secure in a container, you should set up your image and start the container so you can run the commands inside it.

1. Install rl-deploy

In this step, you're going to install the rl-deploy tool.

Install from PyPI

1. In your terminal, navigate to the directory where you want to install rl-deploy.

2. Install the latest rl-deploy version from PyPI with pip.

python3 -m pip install rl-deploy

(We're using the python3 -m approach to prevent issues with the pip version in your $PATH in case you have multiple Python installations on your machine.)

3. To confirm rl-deploy is successfully installed on your system, run the following command in the terminal. On Windows, you may need to add the rl-deploy executable location to the PATH system environment variable to be able to run it from anywhere.

rl-deploy --version

Install from standalone package

1. In your terminal, navigate to the directory where you want to install rl-deploy.

2. Download the standalone installation package of rl-deploy for your platform. You can use the following direct links to download the packages in your browser, or use a CLI tool like curl or wget to download them in the terminal.

• Linux: Rocky Linux RPM, Rocky Linux tgz
• Windows: Windows executable

3. Install the latest rl-deploy version from the package you downloaded.

Linux

yum install /path/to/rl-deploy.rpm

Windows

X:\path\to\rl-deploy.exe

4. Add the rl-deploy executable location to the PATH system environment variable to be able to run it from anywhere. On Linux, the rl-deploy executable can be found in /opt/rl-deploy/ by default. On Windows, the location of the executable depends on where the user chose to install rl-deploy.

5. To confirm rl-deploy is successfully installed on your system, run the following command in the terminal.

rl-deploy --version

2. Use rl-deploy to install rl-secure

In this step, you're going to install rl-secure through rl-deploy.

To install rl-secure with rl-deploy, you need to provide your license and the site key in the installation command.

The site key is a string that lets you associate any rl-secure installation with your license. This allows you to install rl-secure on multiple ephemeral systems with the same license.

To complete the installation process, switch to the licensing guide and follow the steps described there.

The examples in the licensing guide let you choose how to provide the license:

• as a path to the license file
• as a string representing Base64-encoded contents of the license file.

For CI/CD and similar automated deployments, it's usually more convenient to provide the license as a string directly in the installation command.

Installing rl-secure without the site key

The site key is useful only on ephemeral systems.

For everyday rl-secure usage on typical workstations, install it with rl-deploy without providing the site key or follow the default rl-secure installation instructions.

Use optional proxy configuration

In some cases, custom proxy configuration may be needed to download and install rl-secure. The rl-deploy tool supports specifying proxy configuration parameters directly in the installation command.

If your organization is using a proxy server to protect its network, rl-secure installation without proxy configuration may fail. If this happens, add your proxy settings to the installation command.

rl-deploy install /path/to/installation-directory --encoded-key=your-license-contents-as-Base64-encoded-string --site-key=your-site-key --no-tracking --proxy-server 127.0.0.1 --proxy-port 8080 --proxy-username your-username --proxy-password your-password

Proxy settings used during installation are automatically saved to the rl-secure configuration file, so rl-secure can continue using them when it needs to connect to ReversingLabs servers. You can change those settings at any time with the rl-secure config command or by manually editing the config.info file.

Note the rl-deploy proxy configuration does not support system-provided certificates, so it will not work if you have a custom certificate.

Next steps

• Follow the rl-secure quick start guide to scan your first package