Issue with portable license keys in ST3 Build 3143

[Psyop]

I’m trying to run Sublime Text 3 (Built 3143, Windows) off a read-only network share (where we host all our other applications).

I’m trying to follow these instructions:

http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/portable_license_keys.html

I use the portable version of Sublime Text 3 to generate the License.sublime_license file from our 10 user license. But when I try to run the “installed” Sublime Text 3 after having copied it to the network share, Sublime always shows up as UNREGISTERED. If I generate License.sublime_license from the “installed” Sublime Text 3 version, then it will recognize the license, but of course only on the machine where the license was generated.

So it seems like the ability to get “installed” Sublime Text 3 to recognize a license file generated by the portable version may be broken?

Running the portable version off the network is not an option, since it tries to write preferences to the Data directory in its installation directory, and that’s read-only and shared between users / workstations.

Also, using Windows Process monitor to try to figure out what Sublime Text is doing, I noticed a couple of other things:

• in an environment with workstations joined to an AD domain and roaming profiles enabled, Sublime looks for the license in:

%APPDATA\Sublime Text 3\Local

and not

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Sublime Text 3\Local

as documented.

• Sublime also seems to look for its license file in the directory where the binary lives: that’s actually useful, since it means we don’t need to pre-copy the license to user’s profiles, but still suffers from the incompatibility between the portable and installed versions.

Hope this makes sense, hopefully this is reproducible outside our environment.

[OdatNurd]

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen that particular page before, but as far as I’m aware the binary version of the license file (such as what this page is talking about) is always specific to the particular computer that it was created on.

What you can do however is replace that file with a file of the same name that contains the plain text version of the license instead (basically, the text you would paste into the License dialog), which should do what you want I think,

License installation (Silently)

The above instructions should still work. You can verify the path to License.sublime_license file via entering the license key in the GUI. This will write to the same file, but it will use a binary format that's specific to the local machine. However, the license key will be successfully read from that file if it's in either the binary or plain text format.

[Psyop]

Thank you very much, this seems to work, both on Windows and Linux: sticking the plain text version of License.sublime_license in the read-only network installation directory allows the application to run in licensed mode, and means I no longer need a wrapper script to copy the license to the user’s home directory before running the application.

[niekumam]

Hi,
Can anybody remove page http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/portable_license_keys.html or mark it as deprecated? I wanted to share my license between two business locations and find that first. I tried to:
follow above documentation (!), create account on forum to complain that it does not work, search for similar problems, didn’t find single one, start writing new, warn with popup about this (great feature by the way), and summary waste about an hour before success (which is in fact work-around not solution).

Even link from that (documentation) page to this forum thread might be useful to spare frustration.
And of course it will be the best to fix the problem to make sublime act as described on that page.