chmonitorEditions
GPL-3.0 community build plus planned Team and Enterprise tiers — understand what each edition includes and how the edition flag works.
chmonitor is GPL-3.0 and free forever for a single operator monitoring their own ClickHouse cluster. Nothing is crippled, nag-screened, or artificially limited in the community build.
The edition system exists to gate features that only matter at team or enterprise scale — features that do not exist yet in the OSS build. A misconfigured or absent edition flag never locks a self-hoster out; the system always fails open to community.
How the edition is selected
The edition is resolved at runtime from one of two variables, checked in order.
| Variable | Where it applies | When to use |
|---|---|---|
CHM_EDITION | Server runtime (Cloudflare Worker [vars] / process.env) | Canonical; set this in production |
VITE_EDITION | Build-time inline (Vite CLIENT_ENV) | Use only if you need the edition baked into the client bundle |
Valid values: community (default) or enterprise. Any other value — including unset, empty, or a typo — resolves to community. The parser never throws.
Fail-open guarantee
If CHM_EDITION is missing or unrecognised, the edition is community and all community features remain fully accessible.
Feature availability
The table below maps STRATEGY §7 capabilities to edition. "Planned" means the feature is on the roadmap but not yet built; the scaffold exists in the codebase but is not functional.
| Capability | Community | Team | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| All system-table views (health, queries, merges, storage, topology, explorer) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| AI agent (BYO model key) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| MCP server (read-only) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Single & multi-cluster (manual config) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Community config catalog | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Alerting & notifications (Slack / PagerDuty / webhook) | basic | ✓ planned | ✓ planned |
| Fleet view (many clusters, saved orgs) | — | ✓ planned | ✓ planned |
| Hosted chmonitor Cloud (no deploy) | — | ✓ planned | ✓ planned |
| SSO / SAML | — | — | scaffold (gated, not functional) |
| RBAC | — | — | scaffold (gated, not functional) |
| Audit log, SLA, priority support | — | — | planned |
| Managed AI (hosted model, no BYO key) | — | add-on planned | ✓ planned |
STRATEGY §7 defines the product intent. The "scaffold" rows reflect code that exists in the repository (lib/auth/sso, lib/rbac) but is behind an edition gate and not yet functional in any build.
Enterprise feature gate
The isEnabled(feature) function in lib/edition/ is the only gate used throughout the codebase. Enterprise features currently gated:
alerting · sso · rbac · fleet · cloudCommunity edition returns false for each of these. This does not degrade any community functionality — these features simply do not exist in the OSS build.
Code isolation
Enterprise-only code is isolated so the GPL core never depends on it. The planned boundary is a separate packages/enterprise/ package that the community build does not import. Today's scaffolds (lib/auth/sso, lib/rbac) follow the same pattern: they are guarded by isEnabled() checks and are inert in community builds.
Summary
Community
Everything an individual operator needs — all system-table views, AI agent, MCP. Free, self-hosted, no time limit.
Team / Enterprise
Team-scale convenience and governance (alerting, fleet, SSO, RBAC). Most are planned; scaffolds exist but are not yet functional.
Misconfiguration is safe
An unset or wrong CHM_EDITION always falls back to community.