**"Activation key has already been used on this instance"**

Questions
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1

Hi n8n Support Team,

I’m experiencing an issue with activating my license on my n8n instance. I have received a Sustainable Use License or Enterprise License, but when I try to enter the activation key, I receive the error message:

“Activation key has already been used on this instance”.

Thank you for your assistance!

2

Hey @strategicpart1

Are you self hosting or on the cloud version ?

If self hosting run and try again

n8n license:clear
3

I received the same error message running n8n using docker compose through their github docker-compose.yml file

looking at the docker startup log I found:

docker exec -it n8n-n8n-1 n8n license:clear
Permissions 0644 for n8n settings file /home/node/.n8n/config are too wide. This is ignored for now, but in the future n8n will attempt to change the permissions automatically. To automatically enforce correct permissions now set N8N_ENFORCE_SETTINGS_FILE_PERMISSIONS=true (recommended), or turn this check off set N8N_ENFORCE_SETTINGS_FILE_PERMISSIONS=false.
User settings loaded from: /home/node/.n8n/config

For me the fix was clearly in the log
To automatically enforce correct permissions now set N8N_ENFORCE_SETTINGS_FILE_PERMISSIONS=true (recommended), or turn this check off set N8N_ENFORCE_SETTINGS_FILE_PERMISSIONS=false.

I didn’t dig to deep but this LOOKED like it was a permission issue writing to the config file
once i updated this environment variable in the docker file and executed a docker compose down and up everything worked fine