Concepts
This page explains the customer-facing concepts behind Box CLI commands: licensing, plan capabilities, domain setup, and Potter Website Hosting.
Licensing & entitlements
A Box is authorized by a private license key. When you run
box auth, the CLI securely confirms the subscription and
prepares the capabilities included in your plan. Keep the license private and
store it only in your organization’s approved secrets system.
Plan capabilities
After activation, box auth prepares the capabilities included in your plan:
- Commerce services required by the plan are enabled for the Box.
- Relevant areas become available in the Box console and merchant dashboards.
- Approved software is obtained through Potter’s secure delivery service.
This is why Boxes on different plans can provide different product capabilities while using the same installation and management workflow.
Managed activation and deployment
The Box CLI communicates securely with Potter managed services when you activate a subscription, install approved software, register domains, or verify a launch. These private service calls are handled for you; customers do not need to integrate with Potter’s internal service endpoints.
DNS & website hosting
When you run box deploy, Potter associates the approved
public domains with your Box and Potter Website Hosting. Potter can then serve
protected website traffic for the right merchant:
The Box license does not include a license to Potter’s website engine, templates, source code, or hosting infrastructure. Those remain Potter’s proprietary IP and are available through the managed hosting service.
box deploy prints the DNS records you must create and writes them to
dns.txt. After your DNS propagates,
run box deploy --verify to confirm each domain is linked.