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For deployments without internet connectivity to Cartesia’s licensing servers, you can run in air-gapped mode. This mode uses an offline license file instead of real-time authentication.
Download your offline license file from the on-prem portal. See Provisioned Resources for details.

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Configuration

# In your .tfvars file
authenticate               = false
license_proxy_persistence  = true   # Required for air-gapped mode

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Loading a License

You can seed a license at install time (recommended for first deployment) or upload one to a running cluster via the /license endpoint.

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At install time

Pass the downloaded license file directly to your deploy tool. The chart creates a ConfigMap containing the license and adds an initContainer that copies it into the license-proxy volume on first boot, so terraform apply / helm install is a one-shot setup. 
# In your .tfvars file
authenticate              = false
license_proxy_persistence = true
license_proxy_seed_file   = "/path/to/license.json"
Then:
terraform apply
The seed is a one-time bootstrap — if a license already exists on disk, the initContainer skips the copy. Licenses uploaded later via POST /license take precedence automatically (the license proxy picks the license with the latest issued_at), and they are not clobbered on pod restart. To rotate a seeded license, upload the new license with POST /license (see below) — re-running terraform apply / helm upgrade alone will not overwrite an existing license on disk.

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On a running cluster

The /license and /audit endpoints are served by the license proxy pod behind the cartesia-license-proxy service, not by the API pod.
In air-gapped mode, the /license endpoint is exposed for license management.

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Via Port-Forward

kubectl port-forward svc/cartesia-license-proxy 8080:8080 -n cartesia
In another terminal: 
curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/license -d '<license-json>'

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Via Ingress

If ingress is enabled: 
curl -X POST https://<your-domain>/license -d '<license-json>'

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Retrieving Audit Logs

The /audit endpoint is available in air-gapped mode for retrieving usage audit logs: 
curl -X GET https://<your-domain>/audit --output audits.tar
These audit logs contain usage metadata for billing reconciliation. No transcript data is included, which you can validate by looking at the contents of the output.