Installing without internet access
Move the image as a file, verify it arrived intact, and activate the licence on a machine that has never been online.
Nothing about Busabase needs to phone home. The licence is verified on the machine itself with an embedded public key, so an instance that has never seen the internet works exactly like one that has.
What you do need is a way to get the image across.
Move the image
On a machine that does have internet access:
docker pull busabase/busabase-premium-allinone:latest
docker save busabase/busabase-premium-allinone:latest -o busabase-premium-allinone.tar
sha256sum busabase-premium-allinone.tar > busabase-premium-allinone.tar.sha256The tarball is about 489 MB. Carry both files to the target host, then:
sha256sum -c busabase-premium-allinone.tar.sha256
docker load -i busabase-premium-allinone.tarCheck the hash. Do not skip this because the copy "looked fine". A truncated transfer does not fail at docker load — it fails much later, as a container that starts and then behaves strangely, and you will spend an afternoon debugging Busabase instead of the file copy.
Compressing the tarball is not worth it: the layers inside are already compressed, so gzip takes it from 489 MB to 487 MB.
Mirror the supporting images
The Compose deployment also pulls Postgres and SeaweedFS. Either mirror them into your internal registry and set IMAGE_REGISTRY, or move them the same way:
docker save postgres:16 chrislusf/seaweedfs:3.80 -o busabase-deps.tarThe all-in-one image has no such dependency — Postgres and SeaweedFS are already inside it. On a genuinely isolated network, that is a real argument for using it even beyond the trial.
Activate offline
Activation is a paste, not a request. Open the instance, go to System Admin → Licence, and paste the code you were issued. It is verified locally against a public key compiled into the build; no traffic leaves the machine.
See Licensing for what the codes contain and what happens when one expires.
Kubernetes (Helm)
Install Busabase Premium with Helm — what the chart does, the two values that break attachments and sign-in when they are wrong, and when to bring your own Postgres and S3.
Configuration reference
Every environment variable the self-hosted deployment reads — what it does, what happens if you get it wrong, and whether changing it needs a restart.