How To Obtain a RHEL Subscription For Free: Complete Guide

Have you ever wondered how to download, install & use Red Hat Enterprise Linux on your servers or desktops at no cost? Yes! With No-cost. Let me explain how this could be done.

Since the beginning of 2021, Red Hat has expanded all the terms of the Developer Program to enable the RHEL Individual Developer Subscription to be used for up to 16 systems in small production environments.

So In this illustrated & complete guide, you will learn how to obtain a rhel subscription for free and use it on up to 16 machines, you can install rhel on your small production, and test environments or even use rhel as your primary Operating System directly on your laptop.

What is & Why Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)?

Simply put, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is an ideal operating system, an enterprise-level Linux distribution developed by Red Hat, offering stability, security, and scalability.

Benefits of RHEL Subscription

RHEL Subscription provides you with the latest enterprise-grade ready software directly from Red Hat, once you obtain a valid RHEL Subscription you can enjoy the following benefits – for example, and not only limited to – :

1. Access to repositories: You will get immediate access to the latest stable software packages.
2. Security updates: Get Regular patches and updates for the whole Operating System.
3. Support & Knowledge Base: You’ll get access to the Red Hat Customer Portal, where you’ll find a wealth of resources, including documentation and support tools.

And a lot of benefits you’ll discover, you can read more about these benefits here.

Key considerations before choosing a subscription

Well, Red Hat offers different kinds of subscriptions, here’s the key considerations before choosing a subscription:

Support Level

This is the support level you need and there are four types of support

1. Self-Support (Developer Subscription): this is the no-cost, self-supported RHEL and is limited to 16 systems.
2. Standard Support: Email and phone support for medium-sized businesses.
3. Premium Support: Priority support for large enterprises.

Number of Machines

Consider the number of physical or virtual machines you will operate.

Use Case

You’ve to Choose the subscription that matches your specific use case (e.g., server, workstation, virtual data center, SAP, HPC, …etc).

Add-ons:

Red Hat Add-ons provide additional features, functionality, and support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscribers. These optional components enhance the core RHEL experience, catering to specific use cases, industries, or workloads. The available add-ons are (High Availability (HA) Add-on, Load Balancer Add-on, Resilient Storage Add-on, Extended Update Support (EUS) Add-on, and Extended Life Cycle Support (ELCS) Add-on ).

Obtaining a RHEL Subscription

Now comes the most important part of our topic follow these steps until you assign your rhel subscription to your servers or even your RHEL Desktop!

Step 1: Creating a Valid Red Hat Account

Go to the Red Hat Home Page and click on the Log In icon as follows

After that, it will take you to that page, click on Register for a Red Hat account

A New Page like the following will be opened and here you’ve to fill out all this information

Note: If there’s a field with * in front of it, this means that it’s a required field

For the field that asks you to choose a Red Hat login, you’ve to type your email address (e.g., yourname@gmail.com).

Then choose a strong password.

Next type your first name and last name.

Also, you’ve to type your email again in the Email address field.

Type Your Phone Number.

After that, you have to choose a Department, choose from ( IT-Operations, IT- Network …etc).

Choose Your Job Role (e.g. System Administrator) & the company name ( if you don’t want to provide a company name simply type Self-Employed or None).

Finally, choose your country and check the box Notify me about products then click on Create my account.

Now a new page like this will be loaded, then click on that icon

Click on Account details

After that, a new page like this will be opened, Recheck all your typed info, scroll down, and choose the account type ( I prefer to choose a personal account unless you’re registering your Red Hat account with a business email address that belongs to your company e.g. yourname@companyname.com).

So check on Personal then choose your country again and type your address line 1 ( It’s enough )

Now click on Submit.

Another Page like this will be opened and you may choose the Greeting! Then click on save

Till now we have successfully created our Red Hat Login ID. Now comes Step 2

Step 2: Downloading RHEL to get your rhel subscription

Head over to the Red Hat Developers Home Page and click on Log In

Another Page will be loaded, scroll down and you may want to read the terms and conditions of that subscription then check on the box and click on submit.

Now You’ve to verify your email address

Go to your inbox and check the email sent from Red Hat, open it, and click on (Link to e-mail address verification ) or whatever the verification link.

Now from this page click on the Products tab and choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux

And You’ll see that a file named like this rhel-9.9-x86_64-boot.iso will be downloaded

Important Note: the downloaded file size is about 1 GB and when you try to install RHEL the rest of the files will be downloaded from the internet, so if you want to download the full ISO File, simply you can copy and paste the following link in your browser, then hit enter, and you’ll see that a file named rhel-9.5-x86_64-dvd.iso will start to be downloaded.

https://developers.redhat.com/content-gateway/file/rhel/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux_9.5/rhel-9.5-x86_64-dvd.iso

Note: If you scroll down on that page you’ll see that the current RHEL release is 9.5.

Congratulations! Now You have a Valid RHEL Subscription For Free & You can use it on up to 16 machines on your servers or desktops at no cost.

To Verify your subscription, go to the Subscription Management Tab Through the Red Hat Customer Portal, and you’ll see that you have a valid rhel subscription as below with a valid start date and a valid end date.

Assigning RHEL Subscription to Your Server

The last part of our topic will be about assigning your rhel subscription to your servers or desktop machines.

Go to the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console

Read the Red Hat Terms & Conditions then check the box and submit

A Page like this will be opened, click on Insights for RHEL

After That another new page like this will be opened, click on Inventory then System Configuration then Activation keys

Note Your Organization ID because we will need it while assigning the subscription to our servers, Now click on Create activate key

Please give it a name then click next and in the Select Workload, choose the latest release then click next

Now set the options in the Select System Purpose, then click next and create.

Congratulations Again! You’ve created Your Activate Key that will be used to activate your server

Now Open up your rhel shell, type the following commands, and hit enter one by one

sudo subscription-manager remove --all

sudo subscription-manager clean

Now To Register your server or workstation you have two options:

The first one is to register by using your Red Hat Login ID and Password like this

sudo subscription-manager register --username yourname@youremail.com --password yourpassword

Or You can register using your Organization ID and Activation Key you’ve created early.

sudo subscription-manager register --org=YourOrganizationID --activationkey="YourKeyNameHere"

Now You’re Done and Your Server or RHEL Workstation can receive updates and you’ve access to Red Hat Repos.

You can verify the list of attached subscriptions to your server or workstation by typing the following command

sudo subscription-manager list

For the full list of modules that come with the subscription-manager command, you can invoke the help page by typing the following command

sudo subscription-manager --help

Or

man subscription-manager

Or From the subscription-manager cheat sheet from Here.

To list the enabled repos, type the following command

sudo dnf repolist

To list both the enabled & disabled repos type the following command

dnf repolist all

Also, you can update your OS now by typing the following command

sudo dnf update

Conclusion

That’s it as simple as possible! In this article, we walked through every step to obtain a rhel subscription and assign it to our servers or workstations. If you found this post useful don’t forget to share it with your friends.