EPiServer license management across environments
Nov 25, 2010
As we all know whether EPiServer is running in a development, test or prod environment it needs a license to run. Normally this is done by saving the "License.config" file in the root of the application. License management can sometimes be a pain as you always need the license file but it needs to be different on each environment.
However there is a feature of EPiServer licensing that is meant for an enterprise scenarios but it turns out to be quite useful in other scenarios too. The following documentation describes a possible licensing scenario for EPiServer CMS 5 R2 in an enterprise scenario:
In particular there is a section titled "Load Balance Scenario using a common file share" that describes how you can rename your License.config to include the machine name when the application is being shared across two machines using a common network share.
However its possible to use this approach to source control licenses across all environments. For example if there were three machines called "devmachine", "testbox" and "prodserver" then I could rename my individual "license.config" files to "devmachinelicense.config", "testboxlicense.config" and "prodserverlicense.config". These files can safely be checked into source control and deployed onto each environment. It means there is one less difference between environments which should ease deployment issues.
This works fine on EPiServer CMS 5 R2 and 6 but I have not tested on earlier versions. Happy licensing!