Removing the Sitecore Client

This article describes how to remove the Sitecore Client from an installation, which is useful on Web Farm servers.

Sitecore has build in a strong security system which disables installations with a runtime only license file to access to client application. For each request to the Internet Information Server (IIS) Sitecore checks to see if the license is valid for the incoming request. This is not done at a folder level, but is compiled into the code as an aspect concerning all code in Sitecore. This should give maximal security prohibiting access to the Sitecore client if only a runtime license is present.

However, if the wrong license file by mistake is copied to a Web Farm installation, users could get access to the client application, but could not login without a valid username and password. To prohibit all together the possibility to login in such cases, it is possible to delete the client application at a physical level by deleting certain folders.

To delete the Sitecore client application, please follow these steps:

Delete the folder: [Sitecore Web Root]\sitecore\shell\Applications
Delete the folder: [Sitecore Web Root]\sitecore\login

This will permanently delete the Sitecore login page and the entire Sitecore client application, making it impossible to run the Client all together.