Ytukyg

Say I wanted to implement a 30-day trial or run a 5-day beta test. How would I go about this using Python? The idea is that the program stops working and prints a message to the user that the program has expired after said amount of time. I thought about doing it this way.

import sys

import time

start = time.time

expire = start + 2592000

while True:

    Run Program

    if time.time > start + expire:

        sys.exit("This program has now expired")

The problem with this is that the program would have to be constantly running on the user's machine for the specified amount of time. There must be a simpler or more sensible way to go about it, like having the program check at startup if a certain number of days has been reached. Thanks in advance for your input on this.

Update

I just thought of another way of doing this. Would this work?

import datetime

import sys



start = datetime.datetime.now()

expire = start.month + 1

while True:

    Run Program

    if datetime.datetime.now().month == expire:

        sys.exit("Your 1 month trial has expired.")

If you dont care about security, create a file containing the date of the first run, for example:

import datetime

import sys



import os





first_launch_date_filepath = ".first_launch_date"





def is_program_expired():

# Query date of first lauch in given file

    if os.path.exists(first_launch_date_filepath):

        with open(first_launch_date_filepath, 'r') as fileRead:

            time_as_str = fileRead.read()

            start_date = datetime.datetime.strptime(time_as_str, "%Y_%m_%d")

            # Check if current time is greater than time limit

            expire_date = start_date + datetime.timedelta(days=31)

            if datetime.datetime.now() > expire_date:

                sys.exit("Your 1 month trial has expired.")

    # Supposedly first run

    else:

        start_date = datetime.datetime.now()

        with open(first_launch_date_filepath, 'w') as fileWrite:

            fileWrite.write(start_date.strftime("%Y_%m_%d"))





if __name__ == '__main__':

    is_program_expired()

    # YOUR PROGRAM

Be carefull : this is very insecure, I suggest you hide that file but anyone could open this python code and figure out how to bypass this security by editing this code or the file containing the start time.

Encrypt your file, hide it, change its name.
Best way would be to use a server to store that date, upon activation, you would send the date to the server. Because this is python, any user could read, understand and modify these lines of codes to automaticaly bypass your security.