Using The CATALYST Professional Entitlement Utility & Offline Licensing Tools From The Command Line

Introduced in CATALYST Professional version 3.4.0, the Entitlement Utility and Offline Licensing tools from the Command Line are designed to automate and accelerate the software licensing process, particularly in large-scale deployment environments.

These utilities provide administrators with a non-interactive method of configuring licensing parameters, retrieving entitlement information, and generating license files without requiring access to the graphical licensing interface.

A common use case is software deployment across multiple systems, such as university computer labs, training environments, or enterprise-managed workstations. Administrators can execute the utilities with predefined parameters to obtain the required license files and then distribute those files to the target machines as part of the installation process.

Using the CATALYST Professional Entitlement Utility

The CATALYST Professional Entitlement Utility is designed to display the entitlements available to an account. Use this tool to view the entitlements and their indices.

To use this tool, you must have internet access and be signed in. To sign in and view your available licenses, select the hyperlink indicated in the tool. This will open a browser where you will be asked to enter your credentials.

If you don’t have credentials, please contact your system administrator or the CATALYST Support Team for assistance at [email protected].

1. Identifying Available Entitlements

To view the available entitlements and their index required for licensing operations:

1. Open a Command Prompt / Terminal
2. Navigate to the CATALYST Professional installation folder.
   • The default location of the installation folder is found here:
     Windows – C:\PCI Geomatics\CATALYST Professional\exe
     Linux – /opt/catalystpro/exe
3. Run the Entitlement Utility executable – entitlementutility.exe.
   The command will open the Entitlement Utility window. A list of the entitlements and their respective index is displayed.

2. Preparing The Configuration File

To prepare the configuration file:

1. Locate the offline configuration template file:
   • Windows – C:\PCI Geomatics\CATALYST Professional\etc\offline_config.json
   • Linux – /opt/catalystpro/etc/offline_config.json
2. Copy this file to the CATALYST Professional installation folder.
   • Windows – C:\PCI Geomatics\CATALYST Professional\exe
   • Linux – /opt/catalystpro/exe
3. Update the required settings in the JSON file.
   • Ensure that both the download and installation paths use double backslashes (\\) where required.
4. Save the changes.

3. Accessing The Command-Line Help

To access the command-line help:

1. In a command prompt/terminal, navigate to the CATALYST Professional installation folder and use the following commands:
   • offlinelicadmin -h 
To display help and usage information.
   • offlinelicadmin -c  
To display available command parameters and options.

4. Running The Offline Licensing Tool

After updating the configuration file:

1. Open the command prompt/terminal.
2. Navigate to the CATALYST Professional installation folder
3. Run the offlinelicadmin executable – offlinelicadmin.exe.

Additional Notes

The Mode L (List) displays the installed licenses, including license versions and expiration dates. This mode provides a mechanism for users to query the local licensing state and validate existing license installations. It can be used to determine whether licenses are currently installed, review their status, and identify any licenses that have expired prior to obtaining additional license entitlements.