Fixing Sitecore Licence Issue

When working with Sitecore you might face issues like bellow:

At this point your site will not be accessible and you can't run the showconfig.aspx as well.

If you know the location of the data folder (where Sitecore licence live) of your site, you can directly copy the new licence file to that location.

Sitecore default data folder is /App_Data/Sitecore.

But sometimes your website can have a config that override this location for a different location.

In a situation like that we can get the help of Sitecore Config builder. You can download and get to know more about this tool from here.

1. Download the Sitecore COnfig Builder and Unzip to a folder you like.

2. Get the App_Config folder and web.config file of your broken site to a preferred location. Keep the both App_Config folder and web.config file in the same folder.

3. Open Sitecore.ConfigBuilder.Tool.exe 

4. Click on 'Browse' and select the web.config from the location that you have save them.

5. Select 'Save files into the same folder' if you want (this is easier actually ;) ) and click on 'Save'.

6. This will create some couple of files on the location you ask to create.

7. You can find a file called showconfig.xml

8. Open it and find the following section:

<sc.variable name="dataFolder" value="{ Your data folder location }" patch:source="DataFolder.config" />

9. Go to that location. Make sure it has a licence file.

10. Copy your latest Sitecore licence file (copy and replace).

Your site will be now up and running.