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Ran out of trial period and you would like to have that period extended a little bit more, but you don’t feel like contacting the customer support, nor you don’t want to use a pirated copy either. What should you do?In this article, I will introduce a way to reset the trial period to its full duration from the beginning (30 days). As long as you reset the trial period when it begins to time out, you can virtually use the product in “trial state” for unlimited time!The tutorial was done on MacOS, but Window users should not have any problems finding a similar way to follow the tutorial (through the setting files in the hidden folder in Document folder and registry). You have to edit the host file too (to block the connection between the product and its server), but the pattern is the same for both OS.This reset trial guide should work with almost every standalone IDE of Jetbrain, such as IntelliJ Idea, PhpStorm, WebStorm, PyCharm, RubyMine.Let’s get our hand dirty!
The special “Code Signature Issue Override Rules” that Little Snitch creates under certain circumstances can now be edited in Little Snitch Configuration just like normal rules. This should make it less confusing to deal with situations where an application is reported to have no valid code signature. Using Little Snitch's rules you can allow or disallow connections as you need them. And having a little control over that process is a good thing. People - just disallow a connection you don't understand 'until quit' and then do a search on it. (duckduckgo is a good search engine that by all accounts doesn't track your searches.).
1. Terminate your JetBrains application
2. Remove all *.key files in ~/Library/Preferences/<Your Jetbrains product name>/eval/ folder
3. Remove ~/Library/Preferences/<Your Jetbrains product name>/options/options.xml file
In the picture above, the options folder and eval folder are in the same parent folder.
4. Remove any Jetbrains related keys in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.java.util.prefs.plist file
5. Remove all JetBrains related plist files in ~/Library/Preferences/
6. RESTART YOUR COMPUTER (this is important since OS caches all the preferences. You have to restart OS for the new preferences to be fetched)
7. Block connections to JetBrains servers
Open your host file (in MacOS the host file is located at /etc/hosts). Append these two rows to your host file
You can also use other applications to block your JetBrains product’s internet connection (note that the application you use must be able to block outgoing connections). In MacOS I’m using Little Snitch to do this job for me (you can use a demo version of Little Snitch because JetBrains products seem to only connect to their server the moment they are launched, no periodically initiated connections so the demo version will work fine).If you opt for using Little Snitch, the configuration might be tricky so I pasted my configuration here for you.
The application is pretty anal about application code signature so you have to google things a little (the result is at the top of the first page so you should not have any troubles following the guide to tweak the setting to fit your needs).
Reset Little Snitch Rules Free
8. Finally, run your JetBrains product, select Evaluate for free and enjoy your renewed trial period!
Reset Little Snitch
This article is not supposed to be used for pirating, but if you find yourself short of time and/or you cannot find any reasonable excuses to have the customer support extend the trial period for you, then this article can become a life-saver. When you finish with the trial and decide to purchase the product, wipe everything related to your JetBrains product from your computer just in case.