Engineering teams need to distribute licenses among existing developers, provide licenses to new developers, and revoke licenses from developers as needed.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. JetBrains is a world-class vendor of developer tools that are loved by millions of geeks. IntelliJ IDEA, ReSharper, PhpStorm, PyCharm, and WebStorm are all JetBrains products that have become household names in their respective developer communities. As development teams grow and get more diverse, companies start to purchase more subscriptions to JetBrains tools. However, buying subscriptions is just the first step. Engineering teams need to distribute licenses among existing developers, provide licenses to new developers as they come on board, and revoke licenses from developers as they leave or switch to a different technology stack. License distribution takes time and effort, and neglecting license management leads to confusion, downtime, and overspending. Fortunately, JetBrains provides a set of tools that take the pain away from license management. One of these tools is JetBrains Floating License Server. If you are an engineering manager or CTO in an organization using JetBrains tools, this guide is for you. Here’s what we’ll cover in this comprehensive guide to JetBrains License Server: JetBrains Floating License Server (sometimes called “IntelliJ License Server” or just “License Server”) helps dynamically distribute licenses between JetBrains products used in your company. This means you do not need to issue and revoke licenses manually. License Server gives you better control over product usage with features such as whitelists, blacklists, and priority lists. Additionally, it monitors the adoption of JetBrains tools in your company, letting you know how many licenses are currently in use, and how many are available. License Server is a free on-premises application that you can install in your company’s internal network. It’s available to companies that have 50+ commercial subscriptions to any JetBrains products that are part of All Products Pack, namely: Finally, License Server has recently started to support licenses to third-party plugins to JetBrains tools that are distributed via the JetBrains Marketplace. However, it does not support JetBrains team tools such as YouTrack, TeamCity, or Space. If you work at a company with fewer than 50 commercial subscriptions, you’ll need to manually assign and revoke licenses. It’s recommended to look at JetBrains Account and see what it can do in terms of license management. If your company has a stable in-house developer workforce where each developer uses only one JetBrains product, you may not need License Server at all. However, License Server gets increasingly useful when: Let’s consider a few typical scenarios for License Server usage. Let’s say that each developer on your team uses one JetBrains tool as their primary development environment but occasionally uses different JetBrains tools.
