Captain's Log: Stardate 78089.3

Today I tried to slam out as much work as I could on the lower-level c++ code to do all the license activation stuff. Since I got all the PITA stuff done yesterday to get openssl, libcurl, etc, working, today was actually fairly productive. The c++ code now has APIs to call the license API server to register a new license key, save the signed key to disk, check if the key is still valid, and so on.

I find all this anti-piracy stuff pretty annoying/frustrating, since none of the work makes the plugin more fun to use. And one particular worry I have is that I want to make VERY sure that it never screws over someone who has paid for the software. So I have been thinking a lot about testing the license activation code. I wrote a few unit tests, but eventually got to the HTTP parts, and mocking out the HTTP responses just didn't feel great.

The solution I came to was to actually just write a bunch of integration tests that have the c++ license activation/verification code call the production license API server. I added some hidden/test-only APIs that allow the integration tests to reset the server state, and created a test-only license key. So the tests actually go through all the real flows a user will go through and make sure the c++ code and the API server talk to one another correctly, and that the API database reflects the correct state, etc.

I'm quite happy with this testing solution, because it gives me a ton of confidence that the client/server interactions all work the way they should. And since nothing is mocked, it's a really faithful test of what the actual binary will do.

Tomorrow I'll start on the c++ GUI for entering the license key and so on.