Skip to main content

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:

  • Windows 10 and later, 64-bit
  • Linux x86 (all major distributions), 64-bit

rl-deploy is distributed as:

How to get the latest rl-deploy version

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.

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
  1. 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.

  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.)

  1. 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

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​