Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
We were performing local QA tests for functionality that depends on the server's system time. To simulate future dates, we changed the system time of the macOS host machine and restarted OrbStack so the updated time would propagate to the containers.
However, after doing so, OrbStack reported a license validation error and became unusable. As a result, we were unable to continue testing time-dependent application behavior using this approach.
Describe the solution you'd like
OrbStack should validate licenses independently of the host system clock, or otherwise tolerate significant host time changes. This would allow developers to perform legitimate datetime-related testing without triggering license validation failures.
Describe alternatives you've considered
We considered using libfaketime within our Docker containers to simulate different dates and times. While technically feasible, this approach adds significant complexity in environments with multiple microservices.
All services must be configured consistently, and care must be taken to avoid clock-skew-related issues such as authentication tokens being considered invalid because different services observe different timestamps. In practice, startup order and faketime configuration can introduce subtle and difficult-to-debug problems that do not exist when changing the system clock globally.
Additional context
The license validation issue was reproduced on macOS by changing the host system time to a future date (larger than 1 week) and restarting OrbStack so that the updated time would propagate to the Linux VM and containers.
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
We were performing local QA tests for functionality that depends on the server's system time. To simulate future dates, we changed the system time of the macOS host machine and restarted OrbStack so the updated time would propagate to the containers.
However, after doing so, OrbStack reported a license validation error and became unusable. As a result, we were unable to continue testing time-dependent application behavior using this approach.
Describe the solution you'd like
OrbStack should validate licenses independently of the host system clock, or otherwise tolerate significant host time changes. This would allow developers to perform legitimate datetime-related testing without triggering license validation failures.
Describe alternatives you've considered
We considered using
libfaketimewithin our Docker containers to simulate different dates and times. While technically feasible, this approach adds significant complexity in environments with multiple microservices.All services must be configured consistently, and care must be taken to avoid clock-skew-related issues such as authentication tokens being considered invalid because different services observe different timestamps. In practice, startup order and faketime configuration can introduce subtle and difficult-to-debug problems that do not exist when changing the system clock globally.
Additional context
The license validation issue was reproduced on macOS by changing the host system time to a future date (larger than 1 week) and restarting OrbStack so that the updated time would propagate to the Linux VM and containers.