BitBetter is is a tool to modify Bitwarden's core dll to allow you to generate your own individual and organisation licenses. You must have an existing installation of Bitwarden for BitBetter to modify.
Please see the FAQ below for details on why this software was created.
Beware! BitBetter does janky stuff to rewrite the bitwarden core dll and allow the installation of a self signed certificate. Use at your own risk!
Credit to https://github.com/h44z/BitBetter and https://github.com/jakeswenson/BitBetter
The following instructions are for unix-based systems (Linux, BSD, macOS), it is possible to use a Windows systems assuming you are able to enable and install WSL.
Aside from docker, which you also need for Bitwarden, BitBetter requires the following:
- Bitwarden (tested with 1.37.0, might work on lower versions)
- openssl (probably already installed on most Linux or WSL systems, any version should work)
With your dependencies installed, begin the installation of BitBetter by downloading it through Github or using the git command:
git clone https://github.com/jakeswenson/BitBetter.git
Now that you've set up your build environment, you can run the main build script to generate a modified version of the bitwarden/api
and bitwarden/identity
docker images.
From the BitBetter directory, simply run:
./build.sh
This will create a new self-signed certificate in the .keys
directory if one does not already exist and then create a modified version of the official bitwarden/api
called bitbetter/api
and a modified version of the bitwarden/identity
called bitbetter/identity
.
You may now simply create the file /path/to/bwdata/docker/docker-compose.override.yml
with the following contents to utilize the modified images.
version: '3'
services:
api:
image: bitbetter/api
identity:
image: bitbetter/identity
You'll also want to edit the /path/to/bwdata/scripts/run.sh
file. In the function restart()
block, comment out the call to dockerComposePull
.
Replace
dockerComposePull
with#dockerComposePull
You can now start or restart Bitwarden as normal and the modified api will be used. It is now ready to accept self-issued licenses.
If you wish to generate your self-signed cert & key manually, you can run the following commands.
openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout key.pem -out cert.cert -days 36500 -outform DER -passout pass:test
openssl x509 -inform DER -in cert.cert -out cert.pem
openssl pkcs12 -export -out cert.pfx -inkey key.pem -in cert.pem -passin pass:test -passout pass:test
Note that the password here must be
test
.1
To update Bitwarden, the provided update-bitwarden.sh
script can be used. It will rebuild the BitBetter images and automatically update Bitwarden afterwards. Docker pull errors can be ignored for api and identity images.
There is a tool included in the directory src/licenseGen/
that will generate new individual and organization licenses. These licenses will be accepted by the modified Bitwarden because they will be signed by the certificate you generated in earlier steps.
First, from the BitBetter/src/licenseGen
directory, build the license generator.2
./build.sh
In order to run the tool and generate a license you'll need to get a user's GUID in order to generate an invididual license or the server's install ID to generate an Organization license. These can be retrieved most easily through the Bitwarden Admin Portal.
If you generated your keys in the default BitBetter/.keys
directory, you can simply run the license gen in interactive mode from the Bitbetter
directory and follow the prompts to generate your license.
./src/licenseGen/run.sh interactive
The license generator will spit out a JSON-formatted license which can then be used within the Bitwarden web front-end to license your user or org!
If you wish to run the license gen from a directory aside from the root BitBetter
one, you'll have to provide the absolute path to your cert.pfx.
./src/licenseGen/run.sh /Absolute/Path/To/BitBetter/.keys/cert.pfx interactive
Additional, instead of interactive mode, you can also pass the parameters directly to the command as follows.
./src/licenseGen/run.sh /Absolute/Path/To/BitBetter/.keys/cert.pfx user "Name" "EMail" "User-GUID"
./src/licenseGen/run.sh /Absolute/Path/To/BitBetter/.keys/cert.pfx org "Name" "EMail" "Install-ID used to install the server"
We agree that Bitwarden is great. If we didn't care about it then we wouldn't be doing this. We believe that if a user wants to host Bitwarden themselves, in their house, for their family to use amd with the ability to share access, they would still have to pay a monthly enterprise organization fee. When hosting and maintaining the software yourself there is no need to pay for the level of service that an enterprise customer needs.
Unfortunately, Bitwarden doesn't seem to have any method for receiving donations so we recommend making a one-time donation to your open source project of choice for each BitBetter license you generate if you can afford to do so.
In the past we have done so but they were not focused on the type of customer that would want a one-time license and would be happy to sacrifice customer service. We believe the features that are currently behind this subscription paywall to be critical ones and believe they should be available to users who can't afford an enterprise payment structure. We'd even be happy to see a move towards a Gitlab-like model where premium features are rolled out first to the enterprise subscribers before being added to the fully free version.
1 If you wish to change this you'll need to change the value that src/licenseGen/Program.cs
uses for its GenerateUserLicense
and GenerateOrgLicense
calls. Remember, this is really unnecessary as this certificate does not represent any type of security-related certificate.
2This tool builds on top of the bitbetter/api
container image so make sure you've built that above using the root ./build.sh
script.