Auto PHP Licenser 1.7 enables authors to verify nameservers of licensing server, improves internal debugging, and completes transition to OpenSSL-based licenses.

Happy New Year everyone! We released version 1.6 of PHP license manager just 2 months ago. Today, Auto PHP Licenser 1.7 is marks an important milestone in our PHP license management software.

More than 4 months ago we announced about an upcoming switch from Mcrypt-based to OpenSSL-based licenses. This change was required to provide a stronger encryption and ensure a full compatibility with newer versions of PHP. Starting with PHP 7.1, Mcrypt library was deprecated because of not keeping up with today’s security standards. Unsurprisingly, PHP 7.2, released at the end of 2017, dropped it completely. In order for licensing module to work on PHP 7.2 and future versions of PHP, we had to convert existing licenses into OpenSSL.

License conversions from Mcrypt to OpenSSL were automatically performed by Auto PHP Licenser 1.4 and later revisions. Hence, if you used v1.4 or newer licensing module in your scripts, there’s nothing else you have to do. In other words, your main server and all scripts deployed on client machines already use OpenSSL-based encryption, no matter PHP version installed. But what about developers who didn’t upgrade? It’s the last chance for them to do so. Otherwise, migration from v1.3 or earlier right into v1.7 will cause old installations to stop working because of dropped Mcrypt support. If that’s the case, authors should upgrade scripts to v1.4+ first. Once update is performed, a built-in module will automatically convert old licenses into new format. Right after that, developers can take benefit of additional Auto PHP Licenser 1.7 features without any worries.

Let’s continue to other changes and improvements now…

Protect your license verification server from being blocked or nullrouted by locking it to specified nameservers.

Since its first release, our PHP license system offered an option to lock licensing server to specific IP address. It prevents users from blocking, nullrouting or re-routing your licensing server domain on their systems. As a result, if they try to fake successful license verification by routing your domain to unauthorized server, protected script doesn’t even start. It greatly improves overall protection, but possible drawback of this option is IP address change. If you change your server IP address later, protected scripts will stop working until you hardcode new IP into your script and send it to clients.

But one of our clients offered a great suggestion! Hence, v1.7 allows you to achieve almost the same level of protection by locking licensing server to specific nameservers. In 99.999% of scenarios, nameservers remain the same after IP change. It means protected scripts will continue working as long as nameservers specified by developer match actual nameservers of licensing server.

The use of new feature is very straightforward. If you develop a new script, simply include the latest version of Auto PHP Licenser user module. In other words, just follow the documentation on how to integrate PHP license manager into your application. If you want to update existing script, replace existing apl_core_functions.php file with new one. Doing this will not overwrite existing license data, no worries here.  If you use an additional verification (which you should) of file authenticity, re-calculate its hash value and update the script accordingly. Now, open apl_core_configuration.php in  your script and compare it with new file. You will see new one contains APL_ROOT_NAMESERVERS and APL_CORE_NOTIFICATION_INVALID_ROOT_NAMESERVERS fields. Copy/paste them into your old file and save then changes.

Happy using and… wait for more!

We know you are eager to download new version right now. So what are you waiting for? Click the Help & Support >> Software Updates in administration dashboard and confirm this upgrade. New features are waiting for you to use them! If you found them useful, let us know! To show you our appreciation, we will keep adding more and more new features in every upcoming release!

P.S. As always, you can find the full changelog in its usual place. Take a look what else we improved.

P.P.S. A special thanks to our client uzidesign for nameservers verification suggestion.