The Red Hat Developer program provides a number of member benefits, including a no-cost Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals. The subscription provides access to Red Hat’s product portfolio via the Red Hat software access for developers page. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is one of the products included.
The Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals lasts for one year. When it expires, you must re-register in order to continue accessing all the support and benefits associated with the subscription. The support won't change, and it's still available at no cost for developers. This article guides you through the process to re-register and answers frequently asked questions about the process.
Note: See How to activate your no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription for how to set up your RHEL subscription.
You can't renew your subscription, but you can re-register
The first thing to understand is that you cannot renew your no-cost Red Hat Developer Subscription for individuals after the first year. Unlike a paid subscription, the no-cost edition for developers is limited to one year.
So, what's a developer to do? Fortunately, that's easy: You can just register again. Yes, it's that simple. Once your developer subscription expires, simply re-register and get a new, no-cost subscription.
As of August 2023, you can re-register once your subscription expires or within 30 days of your current subscription's one-year expiration date
Why do we ask you to re-register once a year?
The Red Hat Developer Subscription is free for developers, but the services and support it provides aren't free for Red Hat. So, we want to encourage developers who download RHEL to actually use it. One way to do this is to ask developers to re-register their subscriptions once a year. Re-registering confirms that the subscription is still active, and it's a small price to pay for support, security, updates, and more.
How to re-register for your Red Hat Developer Subscription
Red Hat Principal Customer Support Specialist Daniel Marshburn offered the following guidance on re-registering for a Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals after the initial one-year subscription expires or up to 30 days prior to expiration:
- Open developers.redhat.com in an Incognito window in Chrome, a Private window in Firefox, or an InPrivate window in Edge.
- Use your Red Hat login ID to sign in to the site.
- Acknowledge the provided Terms and Conditions.
- Log out of all Red Hat sites and close your browser(s).
- Wait 15 to 20 minutes, then log in to access.redhat.com/management.
- You should now see a new Red Hat Developer for Individuals Subscription on your account.
Troubleshooting
You might need to remove and then re-attach your license after accepting the new terms and conditions for your system to recognize the renewed subscription:
sudo subscription-manager remove --all
sudo subscription-manager unregister
sudo subscription-manager clean
sudo subscription-manager register
sudo subscription-manager refresh
sudo subscription-manager attach --auto
Unable to acknowledge Terms and Conditions
We are aware of an issue where the Terms and Conditions window does not appear for some users, stopping the renewal process. We are working to resolve this issue.
If the Terms and Conditions window doesn't pop up when you sign into the site as described in the renewal instructions (Figure 1), you can use the following workaround to re-register your subscription.
- Sign in, go to your avatar, and click Subscriptions (Figure 2). Alternatively, you can go straight to https://access.redhat.com/management once you have logged in to developers.redhat.com.
Figure 2: Navigating to the Subscriptions page from your Red Hat account. - Click Subscriptions. It's likely nothing will show under Active; click Recently Expired (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Viewing your recently expired subscriptions.
- In the Status column, click the Renew link.
- When prompted, click Submit to request your subscription renewal (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Click submit to request the renewal. - The request might take a day or two to process, but the subscription will be renewed for you. Look out for a confirmation email with the subject We got your request! Here’s what to expect next. Follow the link in the email to log in.
- Repeat steps 1-3 to view your active subscriptions; you should now see the Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals listed.
Frequently asked questions
Below are answers to frequently asked questions about what happens after the one-year Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals has expired.
1. What if I don't re-register immediately? Will I lose all my software and tools?
In a word, no. Nothing will be removed from your RHEL instance if you don't re-register immediately after your subscription expires. Nothing will be deleted. Until you re-register, you will not be eligible for updates and access to the support documents and other benefits that you will probably want. But in the meantime, you can keep developing software.
2. Will the container images I've created still run?
If you've created container images using Red Hat's Universal Base Images (UBI) base images, you are all set. Those images will keep humming along, running the bug-free software that you wrote without issue.
What if I have more questions?
We're here to help! Feel free to leave a comment below if you have questions after reading this article. You can also check the No-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux Individual Developer Subscription FAQs for more information.
Thanks for being a member of the Red Hat Developer program.
Last updated: September 1, 2023