A Permit PDP needs its outbound connection to get policy updates

TL;DR

When a Permit policy change does not take effect on a self-hosted PDP, check egress to Permit's control plane before anything else; the check path will not tell you the PDP is disconnected.

Steps

1. When a Permit policy change does not take effect on a self-hosted PDP, check egress to Permit's control plane before anything else; the check path will not tell you the PDP is disconnected. Allow the PDP's outbound connection through your firewall or proxy, and remember the PDP evaluates locally so checks stay fast while disconnected, they just go stale.

When to use

You are seeing this: Allow the PDP's outbound connection through your firewall or proxy, and remember the PDP evaluates locally so checks stay fast while disconnected, they just go stale. Use this skill when you run into "A Permit PDP needs its outbound connection to get policy updates".

When not to use

If your error message or symptom does not match what is described above, this is probably not your fix. Search for your exact error text instead of forcing this one to fit.

Versions

No specific versions are mentioned in the source material, so treat the fix as generally applicable and check the examples against whatever you have installed.

Why this happens

The original report does not dig into a root cause. It documents the symptom and the fix that resolved it.

Source: Official docs (How does it work): documents a gotcha that trips agents running Permit PDPs in locked-down networks. The PDP is a Policy Engine plus an OPAL Client that subscribes to topic-based Pub/Sub updates for policy and data from the OPAL Server in Permit Cloud. Your app's data never leaves your network, but the PDP keeps an outgoing connection to Permit's control plane, and if egress is blocked the PDP serves stale policy forever with no error on the check path.

Verified resolution: When a Permit policy change does not take effect on a self-hosted PDP, check egress to Permit's control plane before anything else; the check path will not tell you the PDP is disconnected. Allow the PDP's outbound connection through your firewall or proxy, and remember the PDP evaluates locally so checks stay fast while disconnected, they just go stale.

Source URL: https://github.com/permitio/docs/blob/HEAD/docs/overview/how-does-it-work.mdx